Mongolian herders’ vulnerability to dzud: a study of record livestock mortality levels during the severe 2009/2010 winter

Natural Hazards volume 92, pages3–17(2018)Cite this article

Abstract

The livelihoods of people inhabiting inland Eurasia have long been jeopardized by repeated natural hazards associated with a harsh environment and a cold, arid climate. Dzud is a Mongolian word indicating harsh winter conditions. In the present study, we considered dzud damage (e.g., livestock loss) to result from a combination of climate hazard (e.g., cold surges) and herders’ socioeconomic vulnerability. For this study, we integrated crucial socioeconomic factors accounting for major spatiotemporal variations in Mongolia by applying principal component analysis (PCA) to a comprehensive province-level, multiyear dataset. We subsequently characterized the regionality of herders’ vulnerability to the dzud event that occurred during the 2009/2010 winter by conducting a cluster analysis of the provincial principal component (PC) scores for the pre-dzud year (2009). Our results revealed a distinct geographical pattern of vulnerability. Herding households in the northern and northeastern (relatively wet and plain) areas were found to be well prepared for harsh winters, with shelters against wind and availability of forage, including hay, as well as easy access to major urban markets. By contrast, herding households in the southern and southwestern (arid and mountainous) areas were poorly prepared, with inadequate circumstances that facilitate pursuing of otor (movement of nomadic herders in search of better pastures) and lack of access to markets and dzud relief support because of their remote locations. The time coefficients of PC 2, related to winter preparedness, indicated that vulnerability increased between 2003 and 2009 (the pre-dzud year). This was partly responsible for the record-level mortality observed in 2010 across the southern and southwestern rural region, in conjunction with harsh winter weathers.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (25220201) provided by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).

Author information

Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Management, Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, Hohhot, China

    Chunling Du

  2. Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan

    Chunling Du, Masato Shinoda & Banzragch Nandintsetseg

  3. Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, Yokosuka, Japan

    Kaoru Tachiiri

  4. Information and Research Institute of Meteorology, Hydrology and Environment, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

    Banzragch Nandintsetseg

  5. Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences, Tsukuba, Japan

    Hiroshi Komiyama

  6. Faculty of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan

    Shusuke Matsushita

Authors
  1. Chunling Du
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  2. Masato Shinoda
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  3. Kaoru Tachiiri
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  4. Banzragch Nandintsetseg
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  5. Hiroshi Komiyama
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  6. Shusuke Matsushita
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Masato Shinoda.

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Fig. S1

Results of the clustering aimags into four groups. Abbreviated aimag names are shown in Fig. 1a. (TIFF 5637 kb)

Supplementary material 2 (DOCX 17 kb)

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Du, C., Shinoda, M., Tachiiri, K. et al. Mongolian herders’ vulnerability to dzud: a study of record livestock mortality levels during the severe 2009/2010 winter. Nat Hazards 92, 3–17 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-017-2893-4

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Keywords

  • Dzud
  • Socioeconomic factors, snow disaster
  • Livestock
  • Mortality