Dust storms regularly affect northern China, including its capital Beijing. In recent years, Chinese scientists and officials have traced the source of the dust storms to its neighbour Mongolia.
Much of the dust over Beijing in the spring of 2023, for example, originated from parts of Mongolia, seemingly driven by the warming and drying of the climate in the region.
Mongolia’s environment has come to be seen as China’s problem. Chinese netizens have blamed Mongolia’s herders and miners for the exploitation of natural resources and environmental destruction.
In pointing the finger at Mongolians, they ignore the role that Chinese demand for Mongolian resources plays in Mongolia’s environmental problems. In the south of Mongolia, it is dust churned up by mining trucks carrying coal to China on unpaved roads that locals are concerned about.
In August 2026, a major UN conference will be held in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital, on the subject of tackling desertification. According to the Mongolian organisers of the conference, the country is one of the most severely affected by this process, whereby fertile land becomes like a desert and vegetation disappears, with almost 77% of its land now classified as degraded.
In recent years, China has sought to export its own expertise in preventing and tackling desertification to Mongolia, and this conference will provide a platform for China to showcase its global leadership on tackling this phenomenon.
Questions remain, however, about how Chinese anti-desertification measures might work within Mongolia. In China, for instance, these measures have often targeted herders, while in Mongolia, nomadic herding is central to ideas of national identity.
In the spring of 2023, China was hit by a series of unexpectedly severe dust storms. Vulnerable residents of Beijing were told to remain inside their homes as the sky turned an apocalyptic orange.
Dust storms like these originate from dry bare soil exposed to seasonal winds in semi-arid regions, often hundreds if not thousands of miles away.
Increasing dust emissions are linked to climate change, reducing rainfall and increasing temperature, and to desertification. Land degradation due to poor management practices exposes bare soil, as well as leading to the expansion of huge areas of “sand seas”, which kick up dust.
Massive dust storms hit Mongolia.
In recent decades, China has adopted a series of measures within its own borders in an attempt to prevent desertification. Notable among these has been the “great green wall”, initiated in 1978, which seeks to constrain the many deserts and sand seas in the north, north-east and north-west of the country by stabilising the shifting sand with extensive tree-planting. These also act as windbreaks.
Building a relationship?
In 2023, the China-Mongolia desertification prevention and control centre was established in Ulaanbaatar. At a meeting between China’s president Xi Jinping and his Mongolian counterpart Khürelsükh Ukhnaa, Xi pledged support for Mongolia’s “billion tree movement”. This initiative aims to plant that number of trees across the country by 2030.
Cooperation with Mongolia has also offered China an opportunity to demonstrate its expertise in desertification control techniques outside its borders.
Besides using traditional tree-planting and straw checkerboard sand barriers, Chinese engineers have developed techniques for immobilising sand dunes, as well as significant expertise in steel and concrete sand fence designs – and increasingly, in the installation of extensive solar panel farms, including novel vertical panels that also act as wind breaks. However, stopping sand dunes at the desert’s edge doesn’t necessarily prevent dust blowing off the soil in sparsely vegetated semi-arid land.
More broadly, China’s efforts to control desertification within its borders have targeted the livelihoods of herders, who are often from one of China’s ethnic minorities.
Official narratives have blamed herders for desertification, claiming they mismanage rangelands by accumulating excessive numbers of livestock. China’s top-down, state-led environmental plan has seen herders resettled away from the grasslands in a policy known as “ecological migration”. Those who remain have often been subjected to grazing bans or strict limits on the number of animals they can keep.
These policies are based on the privatisation of grassland use, often accompanied by the erection of fencing. This has severely reduced the mobility of herders. Some researchers suggest it is, in fact, this privatisation of land that is primarily responsible for the degradation of China’s grasslands.
It increases localised grazing pressure by preventing the herders and their livestock moving around. Enclosing large tracts of grassland to be turned into forests or solar farms further reduces the land available to herders.
So will China’s model of desertification prevention and control be exported to its neighbours? A recent headline in the South China Morning Post describes the possible expansion of China’s great green wall into Mongolia. Further afield, China has been a model for a similar project in Africa.
The idea of a Chinese great wall, however “green”, expanding into Mongolia would be unpalatable to many Mongolians, because of their deep anxieties over China’s territorial ambitions.
Official announcements from China talk instead of the joint construction of an “ecological security barrier” on the Mongolian plateau, which straddles the border between the two countries.
Unlike China, Mongolia’s grasslands remain largely unfenced. The country is proud of its nomadic heritage, and the kind of large-scale fencing of rangelands and livestock reduction programmes that have been seen in China would be highly contentious in democratic Mongolia.
For now, cooperation remains confined to small, isolated “demonstration zones”, scientific exchange, and support for Mongolia’s own billion-tree movement – which, not surprisingly perhaps, makes no reference to walls.
The upcoming UN conference in Mongolia will take place during the UN’s International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. It remains to be seen how China’s environmental diplomacy there engages with the growing international recognition of the positive role that herders can play in fostering biodiversity, and in helping prevent grasslands becoming deserts.
