The research team, led by Banzragch Nandintsetseg of Tottori University’s International Platform for Dryland Research and Education, built what they describe as the first national-scale, scenario-based climate–rangeland–society framework for assessing future dzud risk. The model couples climate hazard projections from five Earth System Models participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) with a process-based ecosystem model, ORCHIDEE-GM v3.2, that simulates aboveground net primary productivity of Mongolia’s rangelands. On top of this biophysical foundation sits a socioeconomic layer: a herd-growth model tracking births, dzud mortality, disease mortality, and offtake through domestic consumption and exports, calibrated against decades of data from Mongolia’s National Statistical Office. The framework’s historical validation is impressive, reproducing observed livestock mortality with a correlation of 0.79, hay preparedness at 0.84, and livestock population trends at 0.97.

The historical record the model draws upon is sobering. Between 2000 and 2024, dzuds killed approximately 100.3 million livestock in sheep units. The worst events clustered in the 2000s: the 2000–2002 disasters claimed 26.6 million animals, roughly 10 to 22 percent of the national herd; the record 2009–2010 dzud killed over 10 million animals, about 20 percent of the herd; and the consecutive dzuds of 2023–2024 destroyed more than 13 million livestock across two years, inflicting economic damages estimated at 1.5 to 1.9 billion US dollars. In the most affected regions, 63.3 percent of surveyed households reported livestock losses. These are not abstract statistics—they represent the collapse of livelihoods, rural poverty, food insecurity, and waves of outmigration from the countryside to Ulaanbaatar’s crowded periphery.

Crucially, the study shows that dzud is not simply a weather phenomenon. Statistical analysis of the hazard index reveals a significant increasing trend driven primarily by escalating summer drought frequency and intensity, while winter severity itself shows no statistically significant long-term trend. What has changed most dramatically is the vulnerability side of the risk equation. After livestock privatisation in the early 1990s, Mongolia’s national herd doubled from roughly 55 million to 110 million sheep units by 2024, while hay preparedness per animal declined by 33.7 percent relative to the pre-1990 baseline. The herd has now grown approximately 2.5-fold since 1990, far surpassing the national rangeland carrying capacity of about 103 million sheep units, contributing to rangeland degradation that researchers estimate has already deteriorated roughly 70 percent in some assessments.

The future projections are where the study’s alarm bells ring loudest. Under all three climate scenarios examined—SSP1-2.6, SSP3-7.0, and SSP5-8.5—ensemble projections indicate that dzuds will occur nearly annually from the mid-2030s, totalling 13 to 15 events during 2036–2050. Under the high-warming SSP5-8.5 scenario, dzud-related mortality peaks at 49.5 million sheep units in the 2040s. The climate mechanics are compound and cruel: regional air temperatures rise by 2.3 to 2.9 degrees Celsius while precipitation falls by 7.4 to 10.1 percent, with decreases reaching 30 percent in western and central-eastern regions. Meanwhile, snowfall is projected to increase by 24.7 to 29.5 percent across all scenarios, with local maxima of up to 80 percent in western Mongolia. More drought weakens animals going into winter; more snow buries the pasture they need to survive it.

Vulnerability projections compound the hazard story. The national herd is projected to exceed 170 million sheep units by the early 2040s under baseline pathways—more than 60 percent above carrying capacity. Domestic meat demand is expected to grow by 60.7 to 82.2 percent, driven by human population growth of up to 52.3 percent and GDP expansion of up to 5.4-fold, mediated through an income elasticity model. Although total hay preparedness increases modestly thanks to rising rangeland productivity and greater household vehicle ownership, per-animal hay availability declines as the herd swells. In dzud years, hay deficits are projected to run 12.5 to 24.2 percent below the historical average, pushing animals into fatal nutritional stress. Livestock revenues, which rise 22.2 to 27.4 percent during 2025–2035, are projected to fall by roughly 25 percent in the early 2040s under business-as-usual conditions as climate hazards and overstocking collide.

The export-enhanced pathways represent the study’s most consequential finding. Rather than treating export expansion as a simple market-opening exercise, the researchers modelled it as a shift in the fundamental incentive structure of Mongolian pastoralism. Export shares rise gradually from the historical baseline of 0.98 percent of the herd to scenario-specific targets of 5.5 to 6.5 percent by 2050, following a logistic growth trajectory with an inflection point in 2037. The logic is elegant: if herders earn more per animal through quality-focused, timely offtake, they can meet revenue goals with smaller herds. This breaks the demographic inertia that currently sustains herd growth—birth rates of about 31 percent, negligible disease mortality of 0.08 percent, and minimal export offtake—allowing populations to stabilise by the early 2040s and then decline below the carrying capacity threshold.

The quantified results are dramatic. Export-enhanced pathways reduce annual dzud mortality from 8 to 11 million sheep units under baseline pathways down to 1 to 3 million, preventing an estimated 6.0 to 9.5 million animal deaths annually during 2036–2050. Simultaneously, meat revenues increase by 9.2 to 25.4 percent under the business-as-usual export variant, 33.2 to 36.3 percent under SSP-aligned trends, and 27.6 to 34.1 percent under the Vision 2050 development pathway, relative to 2024 levels. The authors emphasise that this demonstrates ecological and socioeconomic sustainability are mutually reinforcing rather than competing goals—a rare and hopeful message in climate adaptation literature. But they are equally clear that the outcome is not automatic: herders have historically responded to market opportunities by accumulating more animals, not fewer, meaning robust institutional frameworks must accompany any export promotion to avoid perverse incentives.

The implementation challenges are formidable. Entering high-value export markets requires compliance with stringent sanitary standards, most critically Foot-and-Mouth Disease certification, demanding sustained investment in veterinary services, epidemiological surveillance, and cross-border biosecurity. The study calls for coordinated investment in veterinary certification, traceability systems, cold-chain logistics, and herder cooperatives, alongside regulatory tools such as pasture taxation and price transmission mechanisms that ensure herders—not market intermediaries—capture the value of export growth. Mongolia’s grass-fed, pasture-based production could be positioned as a premium brand, but only if export growth is grounded in ecological monitoring, herd size regulation, and equitable market access. The authors also caution that hay reserves, while useful, are a temporary buffer rather than a structural solution, since they do not address the proximate drivers of vulnerability: chronic overstocking and rangeland degradation.

The implications extend well beyond Mongolia’s borders. Drylands defined by an aridity index below 0.65 support nearly two billion people, and the study’s integrated framework is explicitly designed to be transferable to comparable Central Asian pastoral systems in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where export promotion experiences offer valuable comparative lessons. The researchers acknowledge their model’s limitations—including national-scale aggregation that cannot capture household-level vulnerability, where families near the minimum viable herd size face the greatest catastrophic risk, and known wet biases in certain CMIP6 models that may overestimate future forage availability. Yet the core message stands with unusual clarity: Mongolia’s pastoralism is approaching a critical threshold of systemic risk beyond which recovery becomes increasingly difficult, and the window for transformative adaptation—aligning herd sizes with ecological limits through market-based offtake, supported by inclusive governance—is open now but narrowing as the mid-2030s approach.

Subject of Research: Projected climate change impacts on dzud livestock mortality and sustainable pastoral pathways in Mongolia's eastern Eurasian drylands

Article Title: Future climate change risks and sustainable pathways for pastoralism in the eastern Eurasian drylands

Article References: Nandintsetseg, B., Shinoda, M., Chang, J., Oniki, S., Agipar, B., Reyer, C. P. O., & Davaadalai, J. (2026). Future climate change risks and sustainable pathways for pastoralism in the eastern Eurasian drylands. npj Sustainable Agriculture, 4(1), Article 78. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44264-026-00173-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44264-026-00173-6

Keywords: Mongolia, dzud, pastoralism, climate change, rangelands, livestock mortality, CMIP6, overstocking, meat exports, drylands, sustainability, adaptation