Reversing land degradation in Mongolia requires fewer animals, higher productivity, and farming that restores the land instead of exhausting it. This shift can raise incomes and boost resilience for herders and their families.

Mongolia’s grasslands are one of Asia’s great natural assets, covering about 1.2 million square kilometers—an area larger than France and Germany combined. Mongolia’s grasslands sustain pastoral livelihoods, retain water, and underpin a livestock economy that is central to national identity. But these rangelands are under growing stress. Desertification and land degradation are already visible in weaker pastures, thinner vegetation, drying water sources, and less resilience to changing weather patterns. 

As the land struggles, many herders have tried to protect their income by increasing livestock numbers.

Herd growth is also cultural: Nomadic herders see animals as savings, insurance, and pride. The result is a vicious cycle in which more animals graze the same land, soils degrade, the size of herds the land can support falls, animals enter winter in poor condition, and herders become even more dependent on herd size instead of better productivity per animal. 

Recent hard winters—known locally as “dzud”—have made this fragility painfully clear.

The answer is not to weaken pastoralism. It is to help pastoralism become more productive, resilient, and regenerative. 

We could protect and boost household income at the same time as reducing herd sizes gradually, if we provide fair incentives and plan proactively for higher productivity per animal, better raw-material quality, improve herders’ links to value chains. 

Environmentally smart herding practices such as rotating pastures, resting of degraded areas, protection of winter and spring reserves, harvesting water, preparation of fodder, and planned movement of animals can give grasslands time to recover.
 

Gradual reduction in herd sizes, guided by fair incentives and local planning, can ease grazing pressure without cutting household income.

Agriculture that promotes restoration of soil and nutrients can reinforce this transition. Restoring vegetation cover, increasing the organic matter in soil, protecting rivers and streams, reseeding bare patches, and managing manure and fodder systems more effectively all help soil hold more water and resist erosion. 

Healthy soil supports healthier pasture. Healthier pasture supports stronger animals. Stronger animals allow herders to earn more from fewer, better-managed livestock.

Community-based breeding programs offer a practical starting point for this shift. Instead of adding animals, herders work together to improve the quality of their flocks and herds. They select better animals for breeding, keep stronger replacements, and phase out poorer performers, matching breeding choices to what meat, hide, wool, and cashmere processors and markets need. 

Simple tools such as field measurements, fiber testing, animal records, planned mating, and basic offspring monitoring help communities see which animals perform better. Over time, this approach moves income strategies away from “more animals” toward “more value per animal.” This can help lay the foundation for quality‑based competitiveness that can support herders, cooperatives, processors, and local authorities. 

Scaling this change will take more than a single project. Mongolia can become a leader in livestock transformation through a package of mutually reinforcing reforms: community pasture agreements linked to the ability of a section of land to sustain animals; fair livestock taxation or grazing fees that are reinvested locally; pricing that rewards quality in cashmere, wool, meat, and hides; risk-financing tools that soften the blow of disasters; and public investment in veterinary care, breeding support, fodder, water infrastructure, and practical advice and training for herders.

Cooperatives can help pool purchases of supplies, enforce breeding rules, share equipment, and negotiate better prices. Processors can reward traceable, high-quality raw materials. Local governments can back pasture-use planning and protect key reserves. Done responsibly, the result could be transformative. Herders would own fewer but more productive animals. Livestock would enter winter in better condition. Communities would have stronger fodder reserves and face fewer catastrophic dzud losses.

Processors would receive more consistent raw materials. Pastures would have space to regenerate, with land slowly regaining vegetation cover and soils holding more moisture and carbon. Rural households could earn more secure incomes from a smaller ecological footprint.

This is the future Mongolia deserves: prosperous herders, resilient communities, competitive livestock value chains, and restored rangelands. The path begins with one clear idea: productivity, not herd expansion, is the foundation of a nature-positive pastoral economy.

The 17th Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification is under way in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, and will run until 28 August.
 

Published: 24 August 2026

Author(s)

Au Shion Yee
Director, ADB's Agriculture, Food, Nature, and Rural Development Sector Office

Dustin S. Schinn
Water Resources Specialist, ADB's Agriculture, Food, Nature and Rural Development Sector

Published Date:2026-08-24