This month, Evariste Kouassi-Komlan, Unicef’s representative in Mongolia, spent nearly three days traveling from the capital, Ulaanbaatar, to a remote western village to deliver medicine. His S.U.V. often got stuck in the snow. Outside each home, called a ger, he found as much as two feet of snow, and piles of frozen animal carcasses.
“Some of the herders have lost all of their animals,” he said in an interview. “All of them.”
Mongolian herders are no strangers to harsh winters. Temperatures can fall to 40 degrees below zero, leaving livestock to freeze to death in a standing position. In 2010, the dzud killed more than 10.3 million livestock, equal to 25 percent of the country’s livestock population, according to the United Nations.
But the rising frequency of extreme weather events has made herders’ lives more precarious. Droughts, dust storms, heavy rainfall and flooding have all tripled in the past decade, as temperatures in Mongolia rise twice as fast as the global average. While dzuds used to happen about every decade, this year’s was the fifth in the past decade.
This year’s dzud, which began in November, has left more than 7,000 families in Mongolia lacking adequate food as the livelihoods of thousands of herders, who depend on cattle, goats and horses, were under threat, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said last week.
More than 2,000 families have lost over 70 percent of their livestock, the organization added, calling for assistance. Snow has also buried more than 1,000 homes.
