Reforesting Mongolia

The Gobi desert in Mongolia. Photo courtesy: Honza Soukup/CC BY 2.0

It's not quite the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings creating a hurricane across the world, but desertification in Mongolia is generating dangerous dust storms thousands of miles away.

Former South Korean Ambassador to China Kwon Byong Hyon made the connection more than a decade ago, and has helped spearhead an effort since then to plant trees in Mongolia, hoping to improve both the lives of nomadic desert herders there and the air quality his own children are exposed to back home in Seoul.

"Intense dust storms have blown across Korea throughout recorded history, but their frequency and intensity have increased in recent decades," PRI journalist Daniel Grossman reported recently for The World, profiling Kwon's "crusade to combat the yellow clouds at their source, hundred of miles away in the Gobi desert of China and Mongolia."

A nomadic family outside their fabulously versatile and movable 'ger' (yurt) in the Gobi desert near Choir, Mongolia. Photo courtesy: Angelo Juan Ramos/CC BY 2.0.

Severe desertification and drought in Mongolia, which is warming twice as fast as the global average, is making life more difficult than ever for traditional livestock herders. It's also sending an unhealthy amount of dust across Asia.

The anti-desertification initiative Kwon founded, Future Forest, has recruited Korean and Chinese students to help plant some 4 million trees in an effort to "prevent the eastward spread of the deserts, the very source of the much-feared yellow dust storms," according to the Korea Herald. For his work, he has been named the first "Sustainable Land Management Champion" by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.

And Kwon is not alone. Korean activist Dong Kyun Park has also been raising money in Korea to plant trees in Mongolia, efforts that Grossman says has inspired "high-level government talk of reforesting denuded areas" in Mongolia and the establishment of a new nursery for native tree species in the capital city of Ulan Bator.