Goats are taking over the steppe…

This headline is a bit of hyperbole. However it isn’t far off.

There is quite a lot of discussion of land degradation, desertification, and climate change in the past several years in Mongolia. One theory about this change is not climate change but the number and type of animals that roam the steppe of Mongolia.

Sheep, goats, cattle, horses, camels, oh my!

Under communism (before the shift to democracy) nomadic herders were limited in the number and type of animals they were allowed to raise. If a herder had a great year and they had a higher number of animals than allowed, the state would take them to be relocated or slaughtered. Since 1990 and the shift to democracy in Mongolia limits on nomadic herders for the amount and type of animals they can posses have been eliminated. This led to a dramatic increase in the number of herd animals in Mongolia. Today there are nearly 70 million of these herd animals. That is more than 23 animals for every human.

As part of this discussion on the changing environment is the phenomenon of dzud. This term refers to a type of natural disaster in Mongolia where a harsh winter causes a large number of animals to die. The record for dzud in Mongolia was the 2009–2010 winter, where 8 million animals died (17% of the population).

To get a better handle on this I put together two visualizations that put this explosion of animals in perspective. The first shows the percent share of each of the five herd animals from 1970 to 2017. The second shows the total number of herd animals over time, with dzuds annotated.