Mongolia

Available in: монгол хэл

There is good news coming out of Mongolia, the land of the eternal blue skies. The economy racked up a second quarter of high growth: the third quarter came in at 20.8 percent, topping the equally amazing second quarter of 17.3 percent (year-on-year GDP growth), as discussed in the World Bank's latest Mongolia Quarterly Update. And while this growth spurt originated in the mining sector, with Oyu Tolgoi—a mega copper and gold mine—getting ready to start producing in 2012 and a whole battery of other, smaller mines producing at full capacity, the high growth is quite broad-based. Even manufacturing is doing well.

The author testing to see if this pebble is indeed a fossil bone

One of my most profound biodiversity ‘wow’ moments as a teenager was seeing the arms of the Mongolian Deinocheirus (‘Terrible hands’) dinosaur emerging from a wall of the London Natural History Museum. The arms are basically all that is known of this awesome species but it has been estimated that, were the whole beast to appear from behind the wall, it would be 3.5 m at the hip and weigh 9 tons, dwarfing almost everything else with which it lived. The arms are 2.6 m long from shoulder to claw tip and the three, cruelly-hooked, razor-sharp claws are about 25 cm long. Compare this with the horror beast of Jurassic Park  – Tyrannosaurus rex. Its arms were a puny one meter long with claws barely reaching 10 cm.

Having never seen dinosaur fossils in situ it was a thrill last week to visit the Flaming Cliffs or Bayanzag in South Gobi. This is the site made famous in the mid 1920s by the flamboyant Roy Chapman Andrews who was supposedly the larger-than-life model for the latter-day Indiana Jones movie character. It was at this site that he discovered not just a great many dinosaur and early mammal fossils, but the first incontrovertible evidence of dinosaur eggs in nests and the first fossilized dinosaur embryos.

View to Ulaanbaatar from a tourist camp on the slopes of Bogd Khan Uul

Okay, so we changed our minds, but we did so for good reasons.

Some 15 months ago I posted a blog about the difficult decisions which led to our dropping Bogd Khan Uul Strictly Protected Area—the world’s oldest nature reserve—from the forest landscapes project we were preparing in Mongolia. In addition I mentioned that the money that was going to be used for the community forestry parts of the project was going to be shifted to give additional support to a $40 million Development Policy Credit to help Mongolia weather the impacts of the global financial crisis. There was a chance that our forest landscapes project might be resurrected in mid-2011 but that would have been too late for the Global Environment Facility (GEF) funding of the conservation activities planned. So, the forest landscapes project was cancelled.

The GEF money was, however, still available for a good conservation project in Mongolia but there was absolutely no thought that Bogd Khan Uul with all its allegedly illegal apartment blocks and houses would be part of any new project.

No mountains are visible beyond this pollution cloud. (Late November 2007)

It certainly feels like the worst of winter is over for another year, well until December anyway. Daytime temperatures now reach above 0 Celsius (32 Fahrenheit) regularly, the city’s ice sculptures have melted and the slippery footpaths have thawed, making walking in the city safer and easier. There’s also a visible improvement in Ulaanbaatar’s (UB) air quality.

On most days, from my office window, I can now see the beautiful snow-dappled mountains that surround UB; during the heavily polluted winter months the horizon is completely hidden behind a thick grey-brown smoky haze.