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A Steppe Forward: How to Revive Mongolia's Grasslands and Fight Climate Change
Mongolia’s rangelands occupy 70% of the country's territory and are vital for climate mitigation through carbon storage. Research highlights the importance of sustainable grazing practices and collective herder management to restore degraded rangelands and maintain their ecological functions.
Spanning more than 110 million hectares across 70% of Mongolia’s land territory, and renowned as one of the last remaining natural steppe ecosystems, Mongolian rangelands have a crucial role to play in the country’s climate mitigation efforts.
If well managed, rangelands can serve as more stable carbon stores than forests, as they are more resilient to environmental stresses such as drought and fire.
Effective management practices can boost soil carbon stocks by increasing organic matter input or reducing carbon losses. Through photosynthesis, plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. As grasses grow, their dry and dead leaves and stems fall to the ground and decompose.
Roots, which often have more biomass below ground than above, also grow, and some die and decompose each year. Soil microorganisms aid in decomposing organic matter, and carbon from these sources is incorporated into soil carbon stocks.
Current carbon estimates for rangelands often focus on the topsoil, but a substantial amount of grassland soil carbon is found in deeper subsoil layers.
When rangelands degrade, soil carbon is released into the atmosphere. Therefore, scientists advise that climate mitigation efforts should focus on protecting this irreplaceable soil carbon as its restoration is difficult once lost.
In rangeland management science, this is known as a tipping point where changes in vegetation and soil become impossible to reverse.
Are Mongolian rangelands close to a tipping point? In the past thirty years, the livestock population in Mongolia has tripled, surpassing the rangelands’ carrying capacity by three times. This has resulted in degradation of 65% of rangelands.
However, due to traditional rotational grazing practices, most of the degraded rangelands have retained their ability to recover. Research findings confirm that 85% of degraded rangelands maintain their natural regeneration capacity if the level of degradation has not passed the threshold of no recovery.
Please, view the full research by visiting the site bellow:
https://blogs.adb.org/blog/steppe-forward-how-revive-mongolia-s-grasslands-and-fight-climate-change
