Mongolia's COP17 Faces Pressure From Pastoralists Over Land Rights

With COP17 on desertification and land degradation convened in Ulaanbaatar, pastoralist communities from across Central Asia and the Mongolian steppe are pushing negotiators to embed customary mobility rights — the ability to move herds across seasonal grazing routes — into national land restoration frameworks. These communities argue that sedentarisation policies, often promoted by international development programmes, are themselves accelerating desertification by concentrating grazing pressure on fixed plots.

The tension is a textbook institutional mismatch: global land restoration finance flows most easily to fixed-asset projects (tree planting, fenced reserves, GPS-monitored plots) that fit donor reporting systems. Mobile pastoralism, which sequesters carbon and prevents overgrazing across vast dryland landscapes, generates diffuse, hard-to-measure benefits that don't map onto standard project accounting. The result is that a land-use system proven to sustain semi-arid ecosystems for millennia is systematically underfunded relative to high-visibility interventions.

The key outcome to watch from COP17 is whether the $12bn Land Degradation Neutrality fund adopts a specific pastoralist mobility window — a mechanism that would require donor countries to accept outcome metrics beyond plot-level biomass measurement.