By Marissa J. Smith
Mongolia is scheduled to hold the COP17 conference, the annual Conference of Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in Those Countries Experiencing Serious Drought and/or Desertification, Particularly in Africa (UNCCD), from August 17 to 28, this year.
In the past months I have observed colleagues posting relevant commentary and situating Mongolia in relation not only to the upcoming COP17 meeting, but other UN agency-sponsored events as well, particularly that 2026 has been designated by the UN as The International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP). A conference by UNESCO’s International Institute for the Study of Nomadic Civilizations is also being held simultaneously with the COP17 in Ulaanbaatar.
An international meeting on the Rangelands theme was held earlier this year in Kathmandu; at a US-based conference in fall 2025 a colleague told me they were working on obtaining funding for a delegation of Mongolian women to attend that meeting. While I have not heard whether or not that initiative was successful, it is a memorable variation on a theme that has played out across LinkedIn posts that I have seen from Anglophone (American, British, and Mongolian) colleagues commenting on Mongolia’s upcoming host-role for the COP17. In summary, alarms have been sounding about the Mongolian government’s handling of, on the one hand, seeking partners to start new mining and carbon-capture projects, and, on the other hand, appropriate protections (especially that of ensuring inclusion in decision-making and economic development) for herders and the environment they steward, which, after all, sustains the country’s agricultural as well as its thirsty mining economies.
Viewing this dilemma through the lens of legislation and enforcement of property and land use rights (as opposed to, for example, human rights), the state of Mongolian legislation around mining licensing, and also operating and financing agreements with foreign partners (such as Rio Tinto) that are under the jurisdiction of other governments, have been beyond the frame of the COP17 as demonstrated so far. Commentators however have focused concerns about land use, keeping in view also that despite heavy external pressures that peaked in the 1990s and 2000s to conduct land ownership reforms, these remain limited to only the ownership of small plots, the “khashaa,” with title registration and enforcement mechanisms being highly informal and unevenly implemented, including in Ulaanbaatar
Writing in January 2026 and citing a 2024 World Bank report, Ariell Ahearn and Bayarsaikhan Namsrai wrote that “Mongolia’s mining sector currently lacks clear regulations or implementation of internationally recognised mechanisms for social safeguarding practices” and that “the vast majority of over 2700 mineral licenses issued across Mongolia do not account for local impacts or include coherent processes to restore livelihoods, establish grievance mechanisms or share information with affected communities. In February 2023, the Mongolian government issued Decree Number 58, requiring the designated ministry to finalise regulations on social impact assessment. Yet this process has stalled for over two years, with no progress towards requiring or implementing social impact assessment standards in national law.”
Posting on LinkedIn about Mongolia’s new Climate Change Law, with comments based on the June 17th draft that was at the time of writing the latest version available, lawyer Baljinnyam Ishgen writes: “Did we truly focus on the people most impacted by climate change, or did we hyper-focus on securing international investments and carbon credits?” Baljinnyam noted that the late draft of the law does not make provision for equal distribution of benefits, and that the draft “reduced community involvement into ‘presenting and getting feedback’ by making local communities [in]to passive listeners,” and that with herders lacking ownership rights to pastureland, “Leaving the entire core mechanism of benefit-sharing to private contract negotiations is incredibly vague and risky. […] Without baseline statutory protections in the law, how can herders fairly negotiate contracts against powerful corporate developers and international investors?”
The conversation around the COP17 has also not focused on the environmental impacts of mining more broadly (for instance, legislation and implementation of exploration and mining licenses as conditioned by environmental impact assessments). Though “water security and wastewater management” have been a theme, as demonstrated by this pre-COP17 panel organized with British government support in March 2026, water issues are framed as either geologically abstract (“groundwater depletion and recharge processes”) or related to Ulaanbaatarian urbanism (including the groundwater work, focused on the Tuul River basin specifically, which was the focus of a political scandal earlier in the year).