Contributions of multiple climate hazards and overgrazing to the 2009/2010 winter disaster in Mongolia
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Contributions of multiple climate hazards and overgrazing to the 2009/2010 winter disaster in Mongolia Banzragch Nandintsetseg1,2 Baasandai Erdenetsetseg2
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Masato Shinoda1
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Received: 9 December 2016 / Accepted: 2 June 2017 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017
Abstract Mongolian pastoral husbandry is subject to various climate hazards such as dzud (Mongolian for ‘‘severe winter conditions’’). Dzud in the 2009/2010 winter affected 80.9% of the country and killed more than 10 million livestock (23.4% of the total). To understand the natural and man-made mechanisms of this dzud, we examined the contributions of dzud-causing factors such as climate hazards (cold temperatures and heavy snow) and winter–spring livestock grazing (measured as overgrazing rate), which created a distinct regional pattern of high livestock mortality using a regression tree method. The regression tree model accounted for 58% of the total spatial variation of the mortality and identified various types of dzud in each region. Results showed that during the 2009/2010 winter, almost all of Mongolia experienced extreme cold temperatures, with abnormally large amounts of snow. In addition, more than half of the territory was overgrazed because of the lower pasture biomass resulting from summer drought and livestock overpopulation. At the regional scale, high livestock mortalities occurred in moderately to heavily overgrazed regions in south-central and western Mongolia, resulting from the combination of these factors. Conversely, areas with lower livestock mortalities (or non-dzud) coincided with sufficient pasture capacity in the north and east, even under extreme cold and snow. This indicates the importance of controlling the number of livestock to below the pasture carrying capacity regardless of an inter-annually varying climate. Moreover, we identified critical thresholds of each factor across which serious disasters occurred. These thresholds are practically useful for future livestock management of pasture land. Keywords Severe winter Livestock Mortality Cold temperature Heavy snow Overgrazing Pasture carrying capacity
& Banzragch Nandintsetseg [email protected] 1
Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan
2
Information and Research Institute of Meteorology, Hydrology and Environment, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
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Nat Hazards
1 Introduction Pastoral livestock husbandry in cold, arid environments is the main traditional livelihood of the Mongolian rural population; however, this farming practice is threatened by various climate hazards, such as droughts and dzuds, a Mongolian word that describes ‘‘severe winter conditions’’ (Batjargal et al. 2002; Sternberg 2010; Nandintsetseg et al. 2007; Nandintsetseg and Shinoda 2013; Sternberg and Batbuyan 2013; Goulden et al. 2016). Dzud is defined, biogeophysically, as anomalous climatic and/or land surface conditions (i.e., snow/ice cover and lack of pasture) that lead to reduced accessibility and/or availability of pastures, and ultimately
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