UNDP Resident Representative for Mongolia presents credentials www.montsame.mn

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/. On November 25, the newly-appointed United Nations Development Fund (UNDP) Resident Representative for Mongolia, Ms. Elaine Conkievich presented her credentials to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Tsogtbaatar Damdin at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Mongolia celebrates birth anniversary of Genghis Khan www.xinhuanet.com

Mongolia on Wednesday celebrated its National Pride Day or the anniversary of the birth of legendary conqueror Genghis Khan.

Milbank Secures Victory for Government of Mongolia www.milbank.com

Milbank has secured a significant victory in the District Court for the Southern District of New York (“SDNY”) on behalf of the Government of Mongolia. On November 19, 2019, Judge Ramos dismissed the petition brought by Chinese state-owned entities seeking to set aside an arbitral award that had been rendered in favor of Mongolia in 2017.

Russia and China look for more financial cooperation www.chinadaily.com.cn

China and Russia may have more of their business transactions settled in their own currencies as bilateral trade increases and both face rising hostility from the United States.

Elon Musk says Tesla has received 146,000 orders for the Cybertruck since its reveal www.cnn.com

New York (CNN)Elon Musk's reimagined electric version of the pickup truck, the Cybertruck, has captured some internet attention and sales. The billionaire tweeted Saturday that 146,000 orders of the futuristic vehicle are in so far, just two days after it was unveiled to a mixed response.

Mongolian army builds ‘refinery road’ in Gobi www.news.mn

A road connecting the city of Sainshand in Dornogobi Province and the country’s first oil refinery has been completed. Nearly 200 soldiers from the Mongolian Army’s 7780th Unit have been laboring on the 17.5 km long which can take heavy trucks weighing up to 100 tonnes. Also involved in building the refinery road have been engineers and technicians from Mongolia’s peacekeeping force.

China boosting coal power despite global plea to cut emissions www.mining.com

Less than four years after China vowed to limit the use of coal and cancelled more than 100 coal power projects, a new study shows the nation — the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter — is back in love with the fossil fuel.

According to the latest report by Global Energy Monitor, a non-profit group that tracks coal stations, the Asian giant is set to fire up enough coal-based power plants to match the entire capacity of the European Union, which currently sits at 149 gigawatts (GW).

Across the country, 148 GW of coal-fired plants are either being built or are about to begin construction, the study shows. The figure is also higher than the combined 105 gigawatts under construction in the rest of the world, it notes.

While coal’s share of the country’s total energy has fallen from 68% in 2012 to 59% last year, absolute consumption of the fossil fuel has continued to increase in line with a rise in overall local energy demand.

To meet internal needs, the world’s second largest economy has approved new 40 coal mines in the first nine months of this year, while continuing to make use of “green” financing to support coal-related projects.

Last year China’s net additions to its coal fleet were 25.5GW, while the rest of the world saw a net decline of 2.8GW as more plants were closed than were built.

“To meet Paris climate goals, climate scientists say global coal power needs to be reduced 70% by 2030 and phased out completely by 2050,” Christine Shearer, one of the authors of the report, said. “China’s proposal to continue adding new coal power capacity through 2035 flies directly in the face of these needed emission reductions, and jeopardizes global climate goals.”

Miners take the lead
Top mining companies have been reducing or eliminating their exposure to coal on environmental grounds. Rio Tinto (ASX, LON: RIO), the world’s second largest miner, fully exited the coal sector in March 2018, with the sale of its Kestrel coal mine in Australia to private equity manager EMR Capital and Indonesia’s Adaro Energy for $2.25 billion.

Rival BHP (ASX, NYSE:BHP) took a step in the same direction in July, revealing it had been mulling options to divest its thermal coal business, which includes assets in Australia and Colombia.

Shareholders at world’s largest mining company, however, don’t seem too keen to ditch coal. In early November, Australian investors voted against a plan that would have seen BHP leave lobby groups that promote policies at odds with the goals of the Paris climate accord. The agreement, signed in 2016 by almost 200 nations, aims at reducing emissions of gases that contribute to global warming.

Australia’s South32 (ASX, LON, JSE:S32), which spun out of BHP in 2015, is another company to have recently kissed the fossil fuel goodbye. In early November, it sold its thermal coal operations to Seriti Resources and two trusts, for 100 million rand ($6.78 million) upfront.

Last week, Anglo American (LON AAL) became the latest top miner to signal a departure from coal in the near future. The company, already on a trajectory away from thermal coal lowered its 2021 target for the commodity to 26 million tonnes from a previous goal of as much as 30 million tonnes.

Dinosaurs: Restoring Mongolia's fossil heritage www.bbc.com

Eighty million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period, Mongolia's Gobi Desert was a dinosaur's paradise of vast valleys, freshwater lakes and a humid climate.

Mammal-eating velociraptors, lizard-hipped sauropods and spike-armoured ankylosaurs could have been spotted roaming in what are now the Martian red sandstone spires of Bayanzag's Flaming Cliffs.

These prehistorically favourable conditions make the Gobi Desert the largest dinosaur fossil reservoir in the world.

Over almost 100 years of palaeontological research in the Gobi, more than 80 genera have been found. But for many people living there, this scientific heritage remains unknown.

"Putting a fence up is not protection; protection is people's knowledge," Mongolian palaeontologist Bolortsetseg Minjin explains as we wind through the Flaming Cliffs in search of signs of fossil poaching.

It was here, nearly a hundred years ago, that the world's first dinosaur egg nests were found by American scientist Roy Chapman Andrews - the whip-wielding, trilby-wearing inspiration for Indiana Jones.

This discovery was a turning point in the palaeontological history of the world - the first proof that dinosaurs laid eggs.

In the space of just two years, his expedition team unearthed over 100 dinosaurs and took them home to the American Museum of Natural History where many stand today.

And in Bayanzag, renamed the Flaming Cliffs by Chapman-Andrews, little remains to mark this history.

There are no signs, maps or museums to give visitors information about these creatures. Fossil-poaching is rife and as we explored the site, motorcycle scramblers zigzagged over its prize excavation opportunities.

Unlike in America and the UK, where a finders keepers law applies if you happen to discover a T. rex lurking in your flower beds, in Mongolia, as with Brazil and China, any fossils found are state-owned and exports are strictly forbidden.

Yet, dinosaurs from fossil-rich sites like the Flaming Cliffs are still smuggled and find their way into premier auctions.

Among the 30 stolen Mongolian fossils Bolortsetseg has worked to repatriate to date was a Tarbosaurus bataar, a rare cousin of the T. Rex. It had been bought by Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage.

And an earlier BBC investigation found that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has seized $44m worth of smuggled dinosaur fossils in the last five years.

Bolortsetseg says the solution is education and dinosaur-based tourism.

It can be achieved, she believes, by inspiring the next generation of Mongolia's palaeontologists and teaching children in the communities local to these significant sites about their scientific importance.

She has excavated in the Gobi Desert for decades, starting professionally when the American Museum of Natural History had invited her palaeontologist father for a dig and allowed her to join too - but as a cook.

"After the first morning making them breakfast, they headed out to excavate so I just thought, I'll go too," she explains. Already with a masters in palaeontology in her early twenties and a prospector's knowledge of her local area - she was immediately spotting all manner of fossils and got invited back as a palaeontologist in her own right.

And now, through communities separated by thousands of miles of desert, Bolortsetseg has been driving a 37ft bus brimming with replica fossils - the originals never before seen by most Mongolians.

"Even the kids who live right by the Flaming Cliffs often have no idea about the dinosaurs that have been found here, most can't name any dinosaurs and the bus is the first museum they've ever seen," Bolortsetseg explains.

Bolortsetseg founded the Institute for the Study of Mongolian Dinosaurs in 2007 and crowd-funded $46,000 for the museum's workshops across different regions.

Now the mobile museum stops off along dusty, bumpy off-roads through 11 provinces of the most remote parts of Mongolia.

"Before this, I didn't know anything about dinosaurs and now these things make me really proud," says 15-year-old Nyambayar Purevdorj, who lives next to the Tugrugiin Shiree site where the famous "fighting dinosaurs" (entwined fossils of a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops) were found.

Her classmate Badmaa Monhochir agreed: "I'd seen a little bit on TV but didn't know that they really lived millions of years ago. I thought it was just a legend or a children's story.

"In order to protect these fossils, we need to start from ourselves. People who are selling fossils have no knowledge and that's why we are learning now," she adds.

Gabriel Santos, collections manager at California's Alf Museum of Paleontology, has been working on the moveable museum and says adults also benefit from this education.

"Most, if not all, of the teachers we train had no idea that some dinosaurs had feathers, so the people who live so close to where Velociraptor was first found had no idea what it looked like."

Another palaeontologist leading the workshops, Michael Ziegler from the Florida Museum of Natural History, says the aim is to train local people to give dinosaur tours themselves. "Exposure is the biggest thing, starting from the ground up. In the bus, we interacted with every student and then coming back, they brought their parents along to teach them, too."

The prospective tourism benefits generated by dinosaur knowledge are a focus for Bulgan mayor, Munkh-Aldar Tumurbat.

"Our strategy is a nature friendly tourism development without mining activities and licences in our territory," he tells the BBC.

"Eight-year-olds to their 80-year-old grandparents in our town should know about palaeontology and when and how dinosaurs lived."

Mayor Tumurbat says that annually 90% of Mongolia's tourists visit the Gobi Desert and Bayanzag's Flaming Cliffs.

Twelve years ago, there were three tourist camps and 13 mining licences granted in Bayanzag, but Mayor Tumurbat says that he has changed this to only one mining licence, which is due to be cancelled, and now 10 tourist camps. This he hopes will boost local palaeontological tourism.

"Currently, the citizens are getting very small benefits directly to their pockets by running small cafés, stores and a gas station - we need to create opportunities for our community to benefit from tourism," he adds.

The next step for the institute is building a museum at the site and teaching local people to use drones to undo the legacy of fossil poaching.

"Then they can monitor fossils at their fossil sites so they can do the protection and document the illegal activity," Bolortsetseg explains.

"We're waiting for the western part of Mongolia to have paved roads to take the bus museum to the mountains," she adds. And with half of the country's population under 35 years old, Bolortsetseg is working to introduce palaeontology on to the national curriculum within the next three years.

"We want to reach every single child in the country and spread the message that Mongolia's scientific history is part of its heritage and should not be smuggled out of its borders," she says.

Eleventh-grader Nyambayar agrees: "We need to start from ourselves by protecting dinosaurs. Then other people will follow us.

"If we have knowledge on dinosaur fossils and share this knowledge with others, then things can change."

New Governor of central bank appointed www.montsame.mn

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/. Last week, Parliament dismissed Governor of the Bank of Mongolia N.Bayartsaikhan from his position. On November 22, at its plenary session, the Parliament backed to appoint B.Lkhagvasuren as a new head of the central bank of Mongolia.

New Chairman of Financial Regulatory Commission appointed www.montsame.mn

Ulaanbaatar /MONTSAME/. Last week, Parliament dismissed Chairwoman of the Financial Regulatory Commission (FRC) S.Davaasuren from her position.