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This month, Evariste Kouassi-Komlan, Unicef’s consultant in Mongolia, spent practically three days touring from the capital, Ulaanbaatar, to a distant western village to ship medication. His S.U.V. usually acquired caught within the snow. Outdoors every house, referred to as a ger, he discovered as a lot as two toes of snow, and piles of frozen animal carcasses.
“A number of the herders have misplaced all of their animals,” he mentioned in an interview. “All of them.”
Mongolian herders are not any strangers to harsh winters. Temperatures can fall to 40 levels beneath zero, leaving livestock to freeze to dying in a standing place. In 2010, the dzud killed greater than 10.3 million livestock, equal to 25 % of the nation’s livestock inhabitants, in accordance with the United Nations.
However the rising frequency of maximum climate occasions has made herders’ lives extra precarious. Droughts, mud storms, heavy rainfall and flooding have all tripled previously decade, as temperatures in Mongolia rise twice as quick as the worldwide common. Whereas dzuds used to occur about each decade, this 12 months’s was the fifth previously decade.
This 12 months’s dzud, which started in November, has left greater than 7,000 households in Mongolia missing sufficient meals because the livelihoods of hundreds of herders, who rely upon cattle, goats and horses, have been beneath menace, the Worldwide Federation of Crimson Cross and Crimson Crescent Societies mentioned final week.
Greater than 2,000 households have misplaced over 70 % of their livestock, the group added, calling for help. Snow has additionally buried greater than 1,000 houses.
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