Mongolia’s current winter extremes are fueled by climate change and put the country at “high risk,” the Huffington Post reported Sunday.
Ice-cold temperatures have resulted in the deaths of more than 2 million livestock animals this year, HuffPo states, as freezing grasslands and snow accumulation result in livestock deaths from “cold or hunger en masse.”
Climate change has coupled with overgrazing as herders have shifted from strictly regulated communist herding collectives to a “cowboy capitalist model that generates more wealth with more animals,” the article says.
The international charity Save the Children has similarly declared that Mongolia’s severe winter is the result of climate change and “puts children at risk.”
08 February 2024, Mongolia, Tuv Aimak: Sheep and horses of a nomadic family. (Britta Pedersen/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Mongolia is “at the frontline of the global climate crisis,” Save the Children stated, and the resulting brutally cold winter “is putting children’s mental health and physical wellbeing at risk.”
Severe winter conditions have become more frequent “due to climate change leading to pasture depletion,” the organization declared, and much of the country now finds itself under snow.
“Mongolia’s severe weather disruptions have made it one of the most affected countries when it comes to climate change,” the group asserted. “The harsh winter temperatures of -35 Celsius that the country is experiencing is killing livestock integral to the lives of many herders who account for 30% of the 3.5 million population.”