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IFRC NETWORK ACTION IN 2023
Joint situational analysis
Mongolia has a land area of approximately 1.6 million square kilometres and a population of 3.3 million. It is the world’s most sparsely populated country, although it is becoming more urbanized. Nearly half the country’s population live in the capital Ulaanbaatar and other provincial centres. The semi-nomadic lifestyle is still the most common in the countryside, although settled agricultural communities are increasing in number.
There are grassy steppes, deserts and semi-desert terrain in Mongolia, with mountains in the west and southwest, and only 0.8 per cent of this vast country is arable land. Mongolia has one of the harshest climates in the world, characterized by a brief warm season lasting about two months, and a long winter with temperatures below minus 50°C. The country has already experienced significant warming and drying as a result of the climate crisis, and this is expected to continue. Temperatures are rising faster than the global average. Communities across Mongolia are feeling the effects of climate change, which is challenging traditional pastoralist– herder lifestyles and causing a strong rural to urban migration trend. It is likely that the frequency and severity of heatwaves and droughts will increase, especially in the south and southwest. The uniquely Mongolian phenomenon of the dzud (hot dry summers followed by extremely harsh cold winters) will become more pronounced. Dzuds can devastate rural livelihoods, when they destroy the pastureland required for feeding large herds of animals.
Extreme rainfall is likely to become more intense and more frequent in Mongolia, with more rain falling on very wet days, and this may cause more extreme events such as landslides, flash floods and land erosion. Without substantial global action and national climate adaptation, the impacts that these changes will have on people’s livelihoods and health are significant.
In addition, the risk of a magnitude 8 earthquake, which is predicted in Ulaanbaatar, projects a significant potential humanitarian impact.
By August 2022, Mongolia had experienced five waves of COVID-19 and there had been about 952,000 cases, affecting nearly a third of the population. Sixty-seven per cent of the population is fully vaccinated, but there is still transmission of the virus as new variants emerge. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is widening socio-economic, health, education and gender inequalities in Mongolia, and there is increasing inequality in terms of human rights and livelihoods between urban and rural communities. The effects of COVID-19 can be long-lasting and disproportionally hit the poor and most vulnerable households the hardest. In addition, the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated precautionary measures have caused Mongolia’s economy to severely contract. The pandemic came at a time when Mongolia’s economy was already facing a slowdown – particularly in the second half of 2019 – which was mostly driven by weaker commodity prices and the deteriorating quality of locally produced copper (a key mineral export). Both domestic and export markets were affected by the pandemic, and Mongolia’s GDP shrank by 7.3 per cent in the first nine months of 2020 – the worst contraction since the economic transition period of the early 1990s. Mongolia has a Human Development Index value of 0.737, an increase of 27.5 per cent since 1990, and ranks 96 out of 189 countries and territories worldwide.
Long travelling distances and poor infrastructure make living costs much higher in Mongolia than in other countries. It is also difficult to implement community-based approaches to disaster preparedness and resilience, because of the distinctive nomadic lifestyle of Mongolian herders.