Green Gold: Reviving Mongolia's Overgrazed Grasslands

Decades of open-access grazing after Mongolia's transition away from collective herding left much of its steppe degraded, threatening pastoral herder livelihoods. From 2004 to 2020, the Green Gold project, backed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and continued today as the Mongolian Rangeland Research Center, helped herders form Pasture User Groups that sign long-term rangeland-use agreements with local governments to rotate grazing and rest degraded land. The approach expanded from 28 to 155 soums across 21 provinces, directly reaching roughly 60,000 herder families out of Mongolia's estimated 800,000 nomadic herders. By the project's close, herder groups had negotiated rest periods on 3.4 million hectares of degraded rangeland, letting grass and soil recover under traditional rotational grazing.