The US State Department has submitted a proposal for the Trump administration to add China’s Ant Group to a trade blacklist, Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.

The move comes as the financial technology firm prepares to go public. If it is blacklisted, it could deter US investors from taking part in its initial public offering (IPO). Last week, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla), who has successfully urged President Donald Trump’s administration to pursue investigations into Chinese companies, called on the government to look at the options available to delay Ant’s IPO. The dual listing in Shanghai and Hong Kong could be worth up to a record $35 billion.

Ant’s Alipay payment app is currently unavailable for American users in the US, according to a company spokesperson. However, Trump administration officials fear the Chinese government could access the sensitive banking data of future US users.

The US Entity List makes it difficult for US firms to sell high-tech equipment to blacklisted companies. In May 2019, the Trump administration blacklisted Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, calling it a national security threat.

Ant is China’s dominant mobile payment company, offering loans, payments, insurance and asset management services via mobile apps. It is 33 percent owned by Alibaba and controlled by Alibaba founder Jack Ma.

Like Tencent’s WeChat platform, Ant’s Alipay is used primarily by Chinese citizens with accounts in renminbi currency. Most of its US interactions are with merchants accepting payment from Chinese travelers and businesses in the country.

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Strong international cooperation on COVID-19 vaccines could speed up the world economic recovery and add $9 trillion to global income by 2025, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said on Thursday.

Speaking at a news conference after a meeting of the IMF’s steering committee, Georgieva also called on the United States and China to keep up strong economic stimulus that could help boost a global recovery.

She emphasized the need for vaccines to be distributed evenly across the world in both developing countries and wealthy nations, to boost confidence in travel, investment, trade and other activities.

“If we may make fast progress everywhere, we could speed up the recovery. And we can add almost $9 trillion to global income by 2025, and that in turn could help narrow the income gap between richer and poorer nations,” Georgieva said.

“We need strong international cooperation and this is most urgent today for vaccine development and distribution,” she said.

Equitable and affordable access to COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines globally will be key to avoiding long lasting scars on the world economy, the IMF’s International Monetary and Financial Committee said in its statement.

Georgieva also said she had “no doubt” that the U.S. Congress and the White House would ultimately agree on another spending package but was uncertain about the timing. Some $3 trillion in U.S. stimulus spending earlier this year “has been an important positive impulse and we would like to see how it would be continued again,” she said.

The committee said private creditors’ and official bilateral creditors’ participation in debt relief for poor countries is essential, with Georgieva adding that “further private sector participation is still needed, and it remains an outstanding issue.”

The G20 on Wednesday approved a six-month extension to mid-2021 of the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) that freezes official bilateral debt payments, and said they would consider a further six-month extension in April. But private creditors and lenders outside the Paris Club are not fully participating.

“We are disappointed by the absence of progress of private creditors’ participation in the DSSI, and strongly encourage them to participate on comparable terms when requested by eligible countries,” the steering committee said, while encouraging “the full participation of official bilateral creditors.”

Reporting by David Lawder and Rodrigo Campos; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Sam Holmes

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/. In September 2020, Labour agencies in aimags and the Capital city registered 4.7 thousand new unemployed, 1.4 thousand persons from the unemployment register hired on a new job, and 3.7 thousand persons removed from the unemployment register due to inactive job seeking. In Ulaanbaatar, 1.7 thousand persons newly registered in Labour agencies of municipal and the district offices, and 456 persons from the unemployment register were hired in September 2020.

Compared to the same period of the previous year, newly registered unemployed decreased by 2.6 thousand persons (35.7%), the number of persons from unemployment register hired on a new job decreased by 1.0 thousand persons (42.5%) and the number of persons removed from the unemployment register due to inactive job seeking decreased by 2.0 thousand persons (35.0%).

At the end of September 2020, the number of registered job seekers reached 27.5 thousand, of which 17.8 thousand (64.8%) were registered as unemployed and the remaining 9.7 thousand (35.2%) were employed but looking for a new job.

Registered unemployed decreased by 2.6 thousand (12.7%) from the same period of the previous year and 461 (2.5%) from the previous month. Out of the total registered unemployed, 9.4 thousand or 53.0% were women.

Source: National Statistics Office

In Eastern Mongolia near the Chinese border, the people of Erdenetsagaan are furious with the mining companies that have wreaked havoc on their community of 7,000. “Five mountains have disappeared. They are breaking them down and throwing them at us – literally,” says Baatarsukh, a semi-nomadic herder, as he surveys the region’s grasslands.

Pastures that once sustained his family’s way of life for generations are now caked in thick dust and pockmarked by open-pit mines that poison the local environment. “But no one cares about our health,” adds Baatarsukh, who also leads the local organization Erdenetsagaan Without Mining. “No one from the government will do anything.”

Mongolia’s herders aren’t alone in their fight against pollution, the world’s leading cause of disease, disability and premature death.

How Local Action Can Push for Enforcement of Anti-Pollution Laws

More than 150 countries now legally recognize the basic human right to a clean, healthy and safe environment. Many have enshrined this right within their constitutions, passed anti-pollution laws and established ministries to protect the environment. But there’s often a difference between what’s on paper and what gets enforced.

In practice, limited knowledge, capacity or funds prevents governments from upholding their laws, while corruption and lack of political will stymies enforcement in other countries. Whatever the cause, this disconnect leaves millions of people around the world — from neighborhoods of color in Flint, Michigan, to poor fishing villages across Serang, Indonesia — exposed to toxic water, noxious air and contaminated land.

Fed up with the governments’ failure to uphold their environmental rights, many communities are now filing lawsuits, organizing protests and engaging in local political processes to force clean-up.

A new toolkit for community-based action, developed in partnership with citizens and civil society organizations across Indonesia, Mongolia, Morocco, Thailand and Tunisia through WRI’s Strengthening the Right to Information for People and the Environment (STRIPE) project, can support these groups in their fight to hold officials and companies around the world to account. Using an environmental rights-based approach, it provides a roadmap for accessing environmental information, identifying when to engage in decision-making processes and building coalitions to advocate for stronger enforcement of anti-pollution policies.

In Mongolia, Baatarsukh and the residents of Erdenetsagaan have used these strategies to compel government officials to step up efforts to safeguard the community’s right to a safe, healthy and clean environment.

Known for its cashmere wool and lamb meat thanks to the fragile grasslands that support nomadic and semi-nomadic herders’ cows, horses, sheep and goats, Erdenetsagaan is also one of Mongolia’s burgeoning mining hotspots. Mines for coal, fluorspar, tungsten, oil and other commodities have sprung up around the region, with companies submitting new exploration requests each year, including five for radioactive uranium. But many of Erdenetsagaan’s residents have yet to benefit from this newfound economic growth. Instead, increased mineral extraction has threatened their lives, livelihoods and culture. Mining not only erodes the region’s grassland ecosystems, but residents also suspect that it leaches toxic contaminants into the groundwater, poisoning communities’ already limited water supply. Natural springs that once delivered clean drinking water to herders’ animals are also running dry as mining companies deplete local streams.

As mines have spread across Mongolia, so too have unpaved roads that cut across herders’ grazing lands. In Erdenetsagaan, a constant stream of mining trucks ferrying minerals across one of just four permanent road checkpoints between China and Mongolia raises clouds of dust that can travel up to three kilometers and are so thick that villagers can’t see across the road.

Respiratory diseases like asthma, once rare, are now common, while families’ herds are getting sicker. The gritty dust ruins milk curds, a staple of local diets, and soils precious cashmere wool before it can reach the market. These plumes have also sullied the few natural springs that still provide water to herders’ animals, forcing families to dig expensive new wells or abandon their traditional campgrounds.

This environmental injustice wasn’t supposed to happen.

Mongolia’s national laws, many of which have been passed only in recent decades, set some pollution limits to reduce communities’ exposure to harmful chemicals as well as give residents the right to have a say in where companies can mine. At the local level, an agreement between Erdenetsagaan’s provincial government and the mining company that uses the dusty road legally requires the miners to pave the main thoroughfare. Yet the road remains unpaved.

Residents have also documented two oil and fluorspar mining companies’ consistent illegal actions, but officials have yet to revoke the corporations’ licenses. And community members’ repeated requests to access basic environmental information, including environmental impact assessments, water and land use permits, reports detailing companies’ violations of mining regulations and public consultation notices, continue to go unanswered.

The government’s failure to act has eroded trust between the community and their representatives, while joint efforts between officials, companies and local leaders to address residents’ concerns have completely broken down. Community members instead have turned to protests.

Community-based Toolkit Can Support Fight Against Environmental Injustice

In 2015, with support from STRIPE’s Mongolian partners, local civil society organizations used WRI’s toolkit to support residents across Erdenetsagaan and three other communities affected by mining to advocate for strengthening and enforcing pollution laws. These organizations began by helping residents understand Mongolia’s environmental and mining laws, including policies that require officials to disclose environmental information and to consult the public before issuing mining licenses.

Communities then used the toolkit to collect the data they needed to identify the legally mandated actions that government authorities had failed to take. With this information and continued capacity-building support from STRIPE partners, they formed a broad, nationwide coalition to fight against mining pollution.

Together, members of the coalition used the toolkit to prioritize and then advocate for a wide range of changes: amendments to strengthen Mongolia’s national mineral and water laws, better enforcement of existing mining regulations and expanded access to environmental information. Their efforts successfully pushed officials to revoke licenses from companies who repeatedly violated Mongolia’s laws, and in Zaamar, one of the four mining communities, coalition members successfully renegotiated the agreement between communities and the mining companies to secure funding for local development priorities, including initiatives to support small businesses, build new housing, plant trees and protect families from the dust.

Another affected community compelled local authorities to hire a local community leader to monitor mining companies and report violations to the national government. While these steps forward cannot undo the environmental degradation that mining has already inflicted upon these four communities, they can help protect residents from future pollution.

These successes from Mongolia showcase how effective an environmental rights-based approach to combatting pollution can be, and WRI’s toolkit is the first to focus on this challenge.

Citizens Can Help Safeguard the Environment

Enabling poor, marginalized communities – those both literally and figuratively distant from those with power – to define and advocate for their own solutions can spark lasting gains, while also equipping local residents with the knowledge and skills they need to continue pushing for change long after project cycles end. By learning how to effectively make their voices heard, citizens can become a powerful, productive force for good, helping governments ensure that everyone has the opportunity to live a safe, healthy and pollution-free life.

This decades-long fight against pollution also serves as an important reminder to policymakers around the world — particularly those designing COVID-19 recovery packages to reduce endemic poverty and inequalities — that building back better will require targeted support to communities.

Political leaders must go beyond acknowledging the important role that communities can play in safeguarding environmental health to actually providing the tools, finance and resources that citizens need to define and advance locally led strategies.

The market capitalization of all companies trading on China’s stock exchanges has reached a record $10 trillion, as investors bet on the world’s second biggest economy amid coronavirus uncertainty.

The total value of all stocks listed in bourses in Shanghai and Shenzhen secured a new peak of $10.08 trillion as markets closed on Tuesday, the same day that Beijing released positive trade data, the Financial Times reports, citing Bloomberg calculations. The previous milestone of $10.05 trillion was recorded in mid-June 2015, after which the Chinese stock market saw a historic crash which wiped out nearly a half of its value in months.

It took the world’s second-largest economy more than five years to recoup the losses. Chinese stocks managed to recover in recent months after the Covid-19 outbreak triggered panic on global markets in March. Stocks have been close to the $10 trillion milestone since July, and finally surged past the mark earlier this week.

“It’s a meaningful number, especially coming after a pause in the stock rally,” Hao Hong, chief strategist for Bocom International in Hong Kong, said, Bloomberg reports. “It’s possible China’s market value can expand faster now that market reforms like the registration-based IPO system are in place.”

The recent rally was powered by several factors, including fast recovery of the Chinese economy, which was the first to suffer from the pandemic, the appreciation of the yuan and an increased number of Chinese companies’ IPOs. Last year’s launch of Shanghai’s Nasdaq-style Star market also helped to attract more investment.

While some investors are still cautious about the one-year-old market technology board, analysts say the situation in China’s stock market has changed in general since 2015’s bubble popped. They also noted that risk factors are now more controllable and manageable for Beijing, while the share of institutional and foreign investors has increased and margin financing is twice as low as it was five years ago.

“Obviously the question that comes to mind is whether valuation is as bubbly as it used to be [in 2015] and the answer is no,” Frank Benzimra, head of Asia equity strategy at Societe Generale, told the Financial Times.

In school geography textbooks around the world, Mongolia’s Gobi desert is cited as the main example of a cold desert. It occupies almost the entire southern region of the country, covering approximately 350,000 square kilometres. What is less well known is that this desert is very rich in minerals, that extraction of these minerals has led to a situation where the traditional animal herders of the Gobi do not get enough water, and what they do get is toxic.

Before 2000 there were no mines in South Gobi apart from the state-run Tavan Tolgoi coal mine. But over the past two decades, foreign investment has flooded in, with companies now operating 12 large mines, including Rio Tinto’s Oyu Tolgoi, one of the world’s biggest copper and gold mines. Driven by the mining industry’s growing demands, the government estimates that the region’s groundwater will run dry within a few years.

Much of Mongolia’s water is in the north, and the government now plans to pipe this water to the arid south where the majority of the mining takes place, a ‘solution’ that has led to many more problems wherever it has been tried.

Meanwhile, the water shortage is critical enough to lead to violence. L. Battsengel, a herder in Khanbogd, a small town near the huge Oyu Tolgoi mine, told The Third Pole that many wells have dried up in areas where mines operate, and fights over water are common among herders. At a well near a mine, a herder opened fire last year, killing one and wounding another. In another incident on September 29 last year, one herder stabbed another to death in a fight over water.

“Mines take the water and pasture, the main means of life for the herder,” Battsengel said. “We know there is a plan to transfer water through pipes from the northern region. But that may not be feasible because Orkhon and Kherlen rivers are not that big and may not have enough water for diversion.”

Mishigsuren, another resident of Khanbogd, has given up herding. “Being a herder is no longer a simple and pleasant way of life, especially for women,” she said. “I was born to a herder family and lived much of my life as a herder. I quit due to increasing difficulties I was experiencing. Due to the large quantities of water used by mining companies much of surface water – such as small streams – in the surrounding area have all dried up and water in the well fields [a complex of water wells] used by herders has either dried up or decreased drastically. Mining companies use deep aquifers which means mines suck out underground water from area covering tens of kilometres surrounding the mine.”

Batulzii, a herder from Noyon, said, “In our county, there are two coal mines. Though we live about 7-8 kilometres from the mines, we people as well as animals are all covered with dust and breathe polluted air and drink polluted water. We started getting genetically mutated livestock like baby goats and camels born with extremely large heads, three hind legs and so on. That’s from drinking poisoned water. The well field where we used to water 500 camels dried up. It can’t even water 20 camels now. I had to reduce the number of livestock from 1,000 to 500 so that I can have sufficient water from the well fields around.”

Many herders in South Gobi have been forced to give up their traditional livelihood for similar reasons, though there are no official estimates of the numbers.

Effects of uranium mining

The poisoning of groundwater is most serious around uranium mines.

Norsuren, a herder at Ulaanbadrakh in Dornogobi, told The Third Pole that water is poisoned in over 10 well fields around a uranium mine, some as far as 30 kilometres away. He said the polluted water has caused women to give birth to premature or genetically defective babies. “Although it’s not really publicly disclosed, this may affect [adults] as well. We filed a lawsuit, to no avail. The court said that water was poisoned by effects of uranium mining, but the state doesn’t seem to want to do much about it.”

Local media reported four birth defects in a single herder family in the area. Norsuren said, “This is one case now disclosed. But there are many such cases in Ulaanbadrakh. Engineers and other employees of the mining company don’t drink water from the well fields around the mine. If water is fresh and not poisonous as they claim, why don’t they drink it?”

Water demand outstripping supply

World Bank studies show that water demand in the Gobi is growing quickly and will increase further, driven mainly by mining. Currently, mining accounts for 71% of the 155 million cubic metre annual water demand in the Gobi. This growing demand will soon outstrip the available resources.

The World Bank estimates Gobi has about 200-500 million cubic metres of available groundwater. Mongolia’s Ministry of Environment and Green Development has a more precise and smaller estimate of 172 million cubic metres. Going by the ministry estimate, the demand will outstrip groundwater availability within the next few years.

Even with an optimistic estimate of groundwater availability, the Gobi is likely to run out of water by 2030 unless preventive steps are taken urgently.

Transporting water a pipe dream?

Ya. Boldbaatar, head of the water resource department in Mongolia’s Ministry of Environment and Green Development, said, “We don’t have many choices in solving the Gobi water resource shortage issues. The government considers water transfer projects from the northern region feasible and Orkhon-Gobi and Kherlen-Gobi river projects are under review now. Once financing issues are resolved, these projects will need to be implemented. Meanwhile, we are also pushing mining companies towards water reuse technologies that enable companies to reuse 70-80% of the water that has been used once.”

Both of the water diversion plans will need pipelines about 700 kilometres long. Each project has an estimated price tag of USD 550-600 million.

Chandmani, a highly respected water expert, was sceptical of the plans. He said the annual demand from the mines in the Gobi (100-150 million cubic metres) is higher than the water available in the two rivers. The Orkhon-Gobi project is expected to transport 2.5 cubic metres of water per second. “It will dry up the river,” the expert said. “Kherlen is smaller than Orkhon, so don’t even mention diverting water from Kherlen. Also, Orkhon and Kherlen are both transboundary rivers flowing out to Russia and China respectively. This means implementation of water transfer plans may become international issues.”

The rivers are important for regional economies in Russia and China. The Orkhon river converges with the Selenge river, a major tributary of Russia’s famous lake Baikal. Kherlen is the main tributary flowing into Dalai lake across the border in China. The World Bank pulled out of financing the Orkhon-Gobi water project due to public opposition in Mongolia and Russia, and because there had been no consultation with Russia’s authorities. The Kherlen-Gobi project, which is still under government review, has met with public opposition in Mongolia and is not likely to gain support from China either.

With such grave doubts about the success of these water-diversion plans, the herders need a plan that is feasible and sustainable, for themselves and for the animals they have been herding for centuries.

Batsuuri Khaltar is an economist and accountant and contributor to Mongolia’s professional journals and newspapers. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics and a researcher with an emphasis on economic development, environmental protection and mining in developing countries

A French museum has postponed an exhibit about the Mongol emperor Genghis Khan citing interference by the Chinese government, which it accuses of trying to rewrite history.

The Château des ducs de Bretagne history museum in the western city of Nantes said it was putting the show about the fearsome 13th century leader on hold for over three years.

The museum’s director, Bertrand Guillet, said: “We made the decision to stop this production in the name of the human, scientific and ethical values that we defend.”

It said the Chinese authorities demanded that certain words, including “Genghis Khan,” “Empire” and “Mongol” be taken out of the show. Subsequently they asked for power over exhibition brochures, legends and maps.

The spat comes as the Chinese government has hardened its discrimination against ethnic Mongols, many of whom live in the northern province of Inner Mongolia.

The exhibit was planned in collaboration with the Inner Mongolia Museum in Hohhot, China. But tensions arose, the Nantes museum said, when the Chinese Bureau of Cultural Heritage pressured the museum for changes to the original plan, “including notably elements of biased rewriting of Mongol culture in favour of a new national narrative”.

The museum branded it “censorship” and said it underlined a “hardening … of the position of the Chinese government against the Mongolian minority”.

The Chinese consulate in Paris did not immediately return calls for comment.

More than 24,500 Mongolian nationals have returned home so far since the COVID-19 outbreak, the country's National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) said Wednesday.

"Since the COVID-19 outbreak, our country has evacuated a total of 24,553 nationals on chartered flights and buses or trains from COVID-19-hit countries," Batmunkh Uuganbayar, deputy head of the NEMA, said at a press conference.

"We planned to repatriate 2,700 stranded nationals from abroad on 11 chartered flights this month, and over 1,500 of them have been repatriated so far," Uuganbayar added.

The Asian country has confirmed 320 COVID-19 cases so far, all imported.

Thanks to the early introduction of social distancing and rigid health protocols for cross-border flows, no local transmissions or deaths have been reported in Mongolia so far.

The country entered a heightened state of readiness on Feb. 12 to prevent the spread of COVID-19, including the suspension of international passenger flights.

With expanding regional cooperation and a readily available platform, the building blocks are in place for Central Asia to achieve energy security, resilience and economic competitiveness.

When countries cooperate, they prosper. Increased dialogue between nations can boost trade in goods and services, open larger markets for businesses, and strengthen energy security. Energy sharing is particularly important in Central Asia – a region with rich but unevenly distributed fossil fuel and hydro resources.

In the Central Asia Power System – a Soviet-era electricity grid – the region has a readily available platform that can help expand energy trading and boost regional energy security.

Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are rich in fossil fuels, while the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan have extensive hydropower. Yet in winter, the hydro-rich countries suffer from power shortages due to a combination of reduced water flow and higher demand for heating. The solution is for these countries to share energy.

To achieve this, they need physical infrastructure such as transmission lines to move electricity in bulk and a governance structure to ensure the market functions properly. An integrated system would enable the hydro-resource rich nations to buy electricity from their fossil-fuel rich neighbors in winter, while surplus power can flow in the opposite direction in summer.

The good news is that countries in Central Asia have begun to expand regional cooperation. In August 2020, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan signed a decade-long power purchase agreement while a new 500kV transmission line will connect both countries. In 2019, the Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) Program’s 11 members signed a landmark energy cooperation agreement.

Investments have continued to flow into the region’s other mega projects including the Turkmenistan-Uzbekistan-Tajikistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan electricity project, the Central Asia South Asia Electricity Transmission and Trade Project, and the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline.

With strong momentum towards greater regional connectivity, there is renewed attention on the strategic importance of the Central Asia Power System. Built in the 1970s, power sharing under the system has steadily declined in recent decades. But given the system connects Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, it can act as a readily available platform for regional energy security.

Here are four ways to help advance the regional electricity grid as a platform for deeper regional integration.

First, it is essential to ensure adequate transmission capacity in the region, which is a pre-requisite to enabling power trading. Transmission systems in Central Asian countries are generally old and inadequate – they must be strengthened at the country level to meet fast-growing national demand. In parallel, regional interconnectivity needs to be conceived to enable power to flow to other countries.

However, cross border interconnectors will need to generate large bilateral gains to outweigh the costs and thus should be thoroughly and independently studied. Longer-term, ongoing regional network development plans supported by the Asian Development Bank will help to identify critical corridors for regional interconnections.

Second, harmonizing regulations to facilitate greater power trading. Currently, power is traded across the region based on bilateral contracts with agreed tariffs between two parties, while ancillary services such as frequency regulation follow established rules in the Central Asia Power System and interconnected Russian system.

Instead of re-inventing the wheel, the rules of the Central Asia Power System could be further refined and harmonized to provide better governance which could facilitate trading. The Coordinating Dispatch Center, CDC Energia, located in Tashkent, Uzbekistan for example, could function as a regional transmission system operator.

Different market mechanisms need to be assessed for deeper integration including market pooling and day-ahead/real-time trading, which can facilitate different forms of electricity trading between countries. This may also lead to more competition than in bilateral arrangements and result in more efficient use of resources.

Based on past experiences, this will be a long and complex process so a roadmap for reform and development of the regional power market should also strengthen the institutional and governance arrangements, and the design of the integrated power market.

Third, domestic reform efforts must continue. The region is characterized by a range of market structures and uneven market development because of the varying speeds of electricity market reform. While regional trade can still happen without significant market reforms, in many cases, effective electricity trade also requires reform at the domestic level. For instance, energy subsidies, particularly fossil-fuel subsidies, should be phased out gradually as they distort the accurate prices of the traded power, making price determination difficult without cross-subsidizing neighbors.

Third-party access to their transmission networks is necessary for power transit to move through different jurisdictions. Measures to improve the sustainability of a country’s own electricity market are pivotal to the creditworthiness of power importers and exporters. Going forward, continuous regional commercial power trading will eventually require a more flexible market structure. Renewed attention needs to be paid to electricity market reform at the country level.

Lastly, the Central Asia Power System can serve as the springboard to introduce more renewable energy into the region’s energy mix. The system was originally designed to balance the uneven distribution of fossil fuels in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and hydro resources in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan through electricity trading - the same principle can facilitate the shift to green energy systems of countries by relocating carbon emissions from one country to another that can manage emissions more efficiently, and eventually reducing them.

One of the benefits of regional interconnection includes shared reserve margins which can introduce additional capacity in the region, and act as a buffer against energy intermittency – one of the main factors affecting renewable energy. Given that solar and wind-based systems are dependent on the amount of sunlight and wind at any given time and can be subject to seasonal variations, electricity from these sources is inherently affected by intermittency.

Better interconnected capacity would enable countries to use the capacity from neighbors, enabling greater flexibility to accommodate variable renewable energy in the region. A reformed Central Asia Power System could spur private sector investment to further accelerate the expansion of renewable energy. Smarter and innovative technical solutions should be considered at the regional level under broader initiatives such as the Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation program.

With strong momentum to expand and deepen regional cooperation, and a readily available platform, the core building blocks are in place in Central Asia. With further reforms to strengthen regional connections, the resulting energy security, resilience and economic competitiveness will in turn build the confidence essential for further investments in the region.

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/. A meeting of the International Cooperation Review Group (ICRG) of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to discuss final recommendation to the FATF Plenary session held virtually yesterday.

According to Minister of Finance Ch.Khurelbaatar, the participating representatives of more than 100 countries unanimously supported Mongolia’s removal from the list of countries with strategic deficiencies or so-called ‘Grey List’ during the meeting based on the reports presented by the team who visited Mongolia to conduct an on-site assessment.

The Minister tweeted, “Although we were expecting a positive result, everyone was truly happy to hear that Mongolia’s removal from the grey list has been supported”, saying that it came into reality as a result of significant efforts and contribution made by everyone involved in the process.

The final decision regarding Mongolia’s removal from the list will be made at the FATF Plenary session which will be held virtually on October 21-23.