2018: Mongolian National Rangeland Health assessment report 2018 released.

Since 2014, at the initiative of Green Gold Project of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and National Agency of Meteorology and Environmental Monitoring, the nationwide rangeland health assessment is carried every 3 year on 1516 monitoring spots stationed in each of 1576 bags across Mongolia. The national rangeland health assessment report released in May 2015 provided the baseline of rangeland health as of 2014, and the new edition of the report to be presented at the National Rangeland Forum II will show the changes and trends of rangeland health from that baseline. Compared to baseline of 2014, percentage of degraded rangelands has declined from 65% to 57%. The researchers attribute this positive trend to high recovery capacity of Mongolian rangelands to reduced grazing pressure, and commitment of herders to improve their better grazing management practices. Among 57% of degraded rangelands, 13.5 % in slightly degraded, 21.1 % in moderately degraded; 12.8 % in heavily degraded and 10.3 % in fully degraded level. Comparing to the conditions in 2014, the previous reporting year, the degree of degradation has increased in last two years; the proportion of sites that were non to slightly degraded level has decreased by up to 10 % while the sites classified to a heavily or fully degraded level has increased by 4.3-5.9 percent; rangeland communities are shifting to more degraded states. High proportion of these sites are observed in Arkhangai, Tuv, Selenge and Dundgobi aimags shifted to higher degradation levels, and the aimags featuring the highest proportion of highly degraded (IV, V) sites were Sukhbaatar and Dornogobi.