Ulaanbaatar: a warning from the coldest capital on Earth

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, a warning from the coldest capital on Earth.

0:26Once upon a time, actually for the vast majority of human history, people lived as nomads. In Mongolia, one third of the country still does, herding bands of hundreds of animals across the country's vast and pristine grasslands. But this way of life that is so essentially human in 2025 is getting harder. More and more Mongolians are trading the nomadic life for the big city, Ulaanbaatar. And there, they're facing a shocking new problem.

1:11From The Guardian, I'm Michael Safi. Today in Focus, Mongolia's poisoned air.

1:22Tracy McVeigh, you're the editor of one of the parts of The Guardian that ends up producing our most interesting stories, the global development section. and you recently went to Mongolia of all places. Tell me about your journey there. Yeah, I was lucky enough to go there and you feel like you're in the other end of the world, which you are. It's kind of sandwiched between Russia and China, the most extraordinary geography and the most extraordinary place.

1:53It looks like the sky will never end. It's this kind of amazing vista. even when you're in the city you feel that real sense of space and then immediately outside Ulaanbaatar which is a small city, you're in these steps which are just open, open landscape you really feel that sense you know sometimes you go somewhere and you feel like you're just this tiny little part of a landscape and the landscape is taking over, it's like that it's fabulous actually you just kind of want to stop and stare and take it all in. Sounds stunning. It's vast. It is also cold. It is very cold. It's kind of extraordinarily cold.

2:39It's the kind of cold where, you know, I was Googling what I should wear before I went and what I should take. And actually, it's actually quite difficult to even, the temperature, I think, when we were there, was about minus 22, minus 23. So it was, you know, cold. I mean, I like, I'm Scottish. I like the cold and it's a beautiful dry cold. And so if you pick up the snow, you can't form a snowball. It won't hold together. It's so going to dry. So it's a fresh and kind of almost addictive cold. Addictive? I mean, if anybody who's a cold water swimmer will understand what I mean about the addictiveness.

3:18You kind of want to go there, even though it's slightly painful. So it's like cold water swimming, but on land. On land, yeah. With lots of layers, yeah. But Tracey, that cold, that's actually why you were in Mongolia. Yeah. So the cold, I mean, we used to talk about global warming. Now we talk about the climate crisis. And the reason for that is because we now understand that the climate crisis and changes to our climate are not just about something getting hotter. They're about extreme weather events. And what's happening in Mongolia is extreme weather events. So the winters are getting colder and the summers are getting warmer and the winters are getting longer, which is upsetting the way of life.

4:04It's upsetting absolutely everything from the economy to education, to health care, to the way people have been living their lives. As you can imagine, it affects absolutely everything. Last year, the winter of 23, 24 is one of the coldest that they've had on record. And as you can imagine, that just had such a terrible effect on herders. That year, they lost 10 million of 64 million animals. And that was crippling. That's nearly one in six animals in Mongolia was killed in the winter. In the winter. And the reason was because the snow cover lasted for so long that animals who normally they can they can survive a little bit of snow.

4:50But if it goes on for too long, they can't get through that snow. They can't get to the to the grass below. They can't get to the vegetation. So they starve. But what it also does, of course, is it pushes if you have lost all your livestock, then you've got nothing for the next year. You have to build back from nothing. And what it's doing is pushing a lot of people into the cities. You have to get into the city and find a job, and that's what's driving quite a lot of the urbanisation. A lot of people are having to leave the lives they knew and go towards the cities to get jobs.

5:34Badroon Gadi, you're the co-founder of a research group called the New Nomad Institute. you. For people like me who have never been to Mongolia, never had the chance to visit, give us a sense of just how integral the nomadic lifestyle is to the country. As a Mongolian, it's a big part of our identity and who we are. Mongolia is the last remaining nomadic country in the world. The nomadic culture and spirit permeates everything at the national level. Our politics, our economy, our culture. We only have 3.5 million people in total in Mugoya. And still today, about a third of our total population lives this very, you know, in many ways, very traditional nomadic life.

6:30The reason they are nomadic, the reason for the movement is the animals. We have horses, cattle, camels, and then goats and sheep. So having a herd consisting of 300 animals is considered low.

6:51Some people may misperceive it as just sort of random movement. It's really not. It's more seasonal migration to different areas. You need to access pasture, so you need lots of good grass, and you're trying to make sure that your animals have access to water. And the herders can move large distances. And what enables that is the ger, which is the Mugoyen word for yurt. If you're a nomadic herder, it's probably the perfect dwelling. It's evolved over 3 ,000 years. It's a highly mobile structure, but it has a permanent feel to it as well. It's very cozy and homely. And you can build it in an hour if you know what you're doing.

7:43It has no foundation, not even stakes like a tent. So there's no disruption of the ground and the grass and nature and the earth. It's very light, but when you put it all together, it becomes incredibly resilient. So it does very well, you know, under all sorts of weather circumstances. And Mongolia, you know, we have in the south the Gobi Desert. So it heats up quite a bit there. But also, you know, we're one of the coldest places in the world. And so there's extreme weather and the Gere does incredibly well. And even now in Mongolia, over 50 % of all Mongolians live in a Gere. So it's not just some sort of traditional relic.

8:31It's actually something that's very much organically used.

8:38And we just heard from Tracy that so many herders have been forced to move to the city in search of work over the past few years, as that more traditional lifestyle has just become harder to sustain. What has that kind of rapid urbanisation actually looked like? The city of Olaanbaatar in the mid-90s had a total population of 600 ,000. And now it's closer to 2 million. So within 30 years, it's actually tripled in size. And over 60 % of the residents live in what's known as the gear districts, the gear areas. So the defining feature of the gear areas is that it lacks basic infrastructure. So while almost everyone will have access to electricity, very few to almost none will have access to running water, to sewage and plumbing, and then to central heating.

9:37And Orlan Batr is also the coldest capital city in the world. And so, you know, when you don't have a heating system, what happens is all the families in the gay areas, over 200 ,000 households, burn tons and tons of, literally tons and tons of coal throughout the winter months when it's negative 40 degrees just to survive. And that, you know, creates a situation where Ulaanbaatar during the winter months becomes one of the most air polluted cities in the world.

10:16Tracy, air pollution, the pollution that Badrun just told us about, is part of what took you to Ulaanbaatar. Just how big a problem is it? Huge, huge. You can feel it on your tongue. You can feel it on your... It, like, coats the kind of inside of your nose. But, yeah, you can absolutely feel it. You can feel it in the air. Up until 2018, they were measuring the PM2.5, the carcinogenic particles in the air. They were running at rates of 133 times the World Health Organization's safe limits. And those PM2.5 particles are small enough to be able to breach the blood brain barrier. I lived in Delhi for some years, so I'm very well acquainted with air pollution.

11:02Exactly, exactly that. I mean, I think the damage on the human body can be understated. It's a huge, huge problem. So the government, the Mongolian government, did take limited action in 2018. They banned raw coal, but only inside Unabatur. So within the city, they banned raw coal. Out in the steppes and in other smaller towns, you can still burn raw coal. But in the city, they switched to these briquettes. But the rates still of the PM2.5 that we were talking about are still 27 times the WHO safe limit. And you can see, you know, wherever we were traveling, inside the city, we had a little monitor inside the car that was measuring the air pollution.

11:42And you can see as you move between the centre of the city where the air pollution might kind of come down a little bit, then out to the gears where it just goes shooting off. But at no point is it coming anywhere near where safe limits might be or where WHO kind of average limits might be.

12:01It's terrible. It's maddening. I'm not sure how else to describe it. I have three children. And pneumonia, for example, is just such a common thing. It's like a common cold these days in Magoia. And, you know, during the winter months, the children are always getting sick. They're always constantly on antibiotics. You know, go in a hospital very frequently and the hospitals are full. it's a very sad situation the irony is we're living here in one of the most air polluted and one of the most polluted general cities but if you leave Ulaanbaatar and drive for 30 minutes Mongolia has one of the most pristine nature and landscape in the world and there's something terribly wrong with that and that's a failure of all of us of failing our children.

13:03The most trusted estimate seems to be that about 7 ,000 deaths every year from indoor and outdoor pollution. And this is a country of less than 3.5 million people. What do you mean? You said indoor and outdoor. What's indoor? So indoor, in those kind of temperatures, you need heat inside. And in the gares, they have a stove in the centre with a pipe going through the roof of the tent. And that will be, that's what people want. But what's happening is people who don't have a lot of money can't always make sure that those stoves are beautifully maintained. So some of them are leaking. One of the problems that going from raw coal to the briquettes inside the city was actually that there was more indoor pollution coming off those briquettes.

13:48Actually leaking into the jars and that causing quite a lot of carbon monoxide poisonings, which is another problem that's hitting children that they're really not quite sure about the long-term damage of that. I mean, if you're a child and you have low-level carbon monoxide poisoning, it's going to impact on your behaviour, it's going to impact on your cognitive development. I mean, it's kind of horrific.

14:16Yeah, I get very sort of emotional talking about this because I see the science behind, you know, you see more and more research coming out about how much more worse air pollution is than we thought it was, you know, how it actually affects everything. And I think part of the problem is our nomadic culture makes people incredibly adapt that adaptation and assimilation. And what that does is, in a way, we're very good at, you know, adapting to any circumstance and perhaps even these negative circumstances. You know, we just sort of adapted to it. And I think we need to now be more forceful as a society to change the situation.

15:12Tracy, how much does the Mongolian government recognise that this is a huge problem? It recognises it when there's pressure put on it, but coal makes everyone an awful lot of money and it keeps things running very nicely. I mean, 70 % of Mongolia energy comes from coal. They're producing coal, they have coal mines and they're selling coal and they're also importing coal from China. So there is a huge fossil fuel reliance here that really needs to be broken down. And also when you have a problem that only pops up for four months of the year, then when the pollution disappears because people aren't burning their fires anymore in the summer, everyone forgets about it until it comes back again.

15:59I remember that would be the same thing in Delhi. When it was really bad, everyone was talking about it, it was in the papers, and then once it all cleared away, so did the problem. People stopped talking about it. Exactly. You know, it's not a poor country, Mongolia, so there are options that people could do. Lack of political will is the big issue here. People at the very top of the power chain are not engaging with what their people need in order to be able to move forward and build lives within our changing climate.

16:36Coming up, nomadism is our past. Are there lessons in it for our future?

16:51You said, Badrun, that some 60 % of the capital, people living in these gurs, live without water, plumbing and heating. And I'm just wondering why that is, why the government, the state hasn't been able to construct that kind of infrastructure for what is at the end of the day, the majority of the city. That's a very complex question. So the economics of it to build the infrastructure is a lot of resources that the government doesn't have. There's a lot of failures of the government, and I'm very critical of that. But it's also a very rapid increase in population over an extremely short amount of time.

17:33And so I don't think anyone really knows what the appropriate quick solution to that is. But the reality is the Geir district are actually the original form of the city. Historically, Olaanbaatar was just the Geir district. And even more interestingly, perhaps, is that Ozzam Bataar historically was a mobile city. So it actually moved around a bunch of times before settling in its current location. Really, the whole city moved? Yeah, the whole city moved. And again, because of the animals, if people had animals, you know, so it moved. Fascinating. You know, and so I remember having a conversation with some incredible researchers and scientists from MIT's city science group.

18:22And I explained, oh, you know, these are the challenges. We lack infrastructure. And they actually said, you know, yes, of course, that's a big issue. But if you now look at all of the major cities globally, a huge challenge that cities are faced with is the issue of legacy infrastructure. And to actually change that is a very costly and slow process and cities are struggling. And so in some ways, the lack of infrastructure in Olaanbaatar, you could say, is an opportunity for us to actually leapfrog and to actually test out ideas that could actually help other cities around the world. because there are massive challenges globally, especially related to climate change, where the traditional form of the city we know is no longer really viable into the future.

19:16And so as a humanity, we have to start thinking more imaginatively in terms of alternative systems and ways of living. Being tied to one place has become a major issue. And we know that climate migration is already a huge issue, but over the coming decades will be a massive issue globally. And so this idea of movement, of needing to move and unfortunately being displaced and being forced to move is an upcoming challenge. And so I think insights that we gleaned from our nomadic culture could actually be incredibly helpful towards that. And so what are the lessons that you think the nomadic lifestyle hold for us living in these modern urban cities that, as we know, have this enormous environmental impact on the world around us?

20:10I think there's a variety of different things that we can learn from nomadic culture. You know, climate change, I'm very doubtful that technology is our solution out of climate change. You know, it's fundamentally a behavioral issue. And I think the main essence, I would say, of nomadic culture is that there's an extreme closeness to nature. And it's not just appreciation and understanding the value of nature. There's actually a fear of nature and understanding that rather than humans controlling nature, there are aspects that we cannot control. And I think we're accepting that globally now, right?

20:56When all these natural disasters are happening at such high frequency and having disastrous outcomes, we realized that suddenly, you know, we thought for a while that maybe we can control everything around us and, you know, humans can dominate everything. But it's showing that we are at, in many ways, the mercy of nature. And I think the herders always knew that. And the response was to not try and control everything around them. What nomadic people do is they're actually adapting to the environment and they're changing what they can about themselves to fit that current context and the need. I would argue that is a fundamentally different worldview.

21:43And it's something that I hope more and more people actually think about as we head towards a very, very scary in many ways future. And that's interesting because almost the meta story of humanity is often told in such a way where a nomad lifestyle is replaced or kind of transcended by agriculture and from their urbanization. And that's seen as a kind of virtuous thing in some ways. It's a way of concentrating resources and concentrating humanity and leading to kind of progress, however you define it. But it sounds like you've looked at that nomadic lifestyle and seen that there is wisdom to the lifestyles that have been left behind by most of us.

22:28Do you think that is something that will catch on? I really hope so for the sake of our collective global future, because I fear that we're sleepwalking towards destruction at the moment. And if you take a step back and think about it, for the vast, vast majority of humanity, people have been nomadic. It's not just some sort of fringe thing that you see in small pockets of the world today, but it's actually fundamental to humans. And, you know, when you really look at the sort of global political and economic systems that are driving our countries, climate change is a very logical outcome of the larger systems at play.

23:19I think it's become quite obvious that what we deemed as progress for many decades is actually declined. It's not progress. And I think we're starting to see people waking up to that. And what I urge is for people to really take a serious look at these alternative imaginations of how we should live. Badrun, it's such a fascinating country. Thank you for talking to us about it. Thank you so much.

24:01And that was Badrun Gadi, who runs the New Nomad Institute. Look for more information on that online. Thank you also to Tracy McVeigh, the editor of The Guardian's global development section. You'll find all of their stories on our website. That's it for today. This episode was produced by Eli Block. Sound design was by Tony Onuchuku. The executive producer was Sammy Kent. And we'll be back on Monday.

24:40This is The Guardian.

24:47Thank you.