2008 marked the tipping point: for the first time in history there are more people living in urban areas than in rural areas. Cities will inevitably grow even larger as climate change drives entire populations from their places of origin. These people forced to leave their homelands are known as environmental migrants: an emerging phenomenon that is set to evolve into a humanitarian crisis of planetary proportions within the next few decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to a United Nations forecast, by 2050 humanity will face the traumatic challenge of dealing with as many as 200 million environmental migrants. The UN calculates that 90 percent of this migration will occur in less developed countries and will force people who have no hope of reaching the shores of richer nations to seek new means of livelihood in the already overcrowded and impoverished urban areas of their native lands. This projection implies massive population shifts from rural areas to city slums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mongolia is an extremely poor country: 20 percent of its population of three million survives on a cash income of US$1.25 per day and 30 percent suffers from malnutrition. The population of the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, now stands at over 1.2 million. Half of its residents live in slums that have sprung up on the periphery of the city known as \u2018gher districts\u2019 after the Mongolian word for the traditional tent (yurt) that herders abandoning rural areas bring with them and that constitutes their only remaining property.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These photographs were taken in the gher districts of Ulaanbaatar and in the Arkhangai province in March 2011, during one of the harshest dzuds in human memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the past few years Mongolia has been plagued by a profound shift in climatic conditions that has brought about brusque and undesirable social changes in an already vulnerable society. The country has entered a cycle of severe weather: summer droughts that reduce the fertility of grazing land and lower fodder production followed by long, severe winters know as \u2018dzuds\u2019, which are characterised by lower than normal temperatures and unusually heavy snowfalls. Livestock, which constitutes many Mongolian families\u2019 entire assets, often succumb to the extreme temperatures, which can fall to as low as -50\u00ba Celsius during these cycles. In 2010, during one of the harshest dzuds on record, more than eight million sheep, cows, horses and camels died, forcing 39,000 herders deprived of their livelihood to abandon their traditional way of life and migrate to Ulaanbaatar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The men and women depicted in these photographs share a common fate: they are all herders who have been forced to abandon the isolated rural areas they once called home. They came to the city knowing no other life than that of the Central Asian steppe; illiterate and lacking the training to qualify for the types of jobs available in the city, they live in the marginal peri-urban communities lacking basic services such as electricity and running water that have grown along the edge of the city over the past twenty years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a globalized world, the countries most affected by climate change are ironically those that have contributed the least to the creation of the ominous new problem that they now must confront. As these countries have not invested in alternative development schemes for areas affected by climate change, the inhabitants of these zones have no other option than to abandon their increasingly inhospitable homelands and seek a new life in the city.<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
2008 marked the tipping point: for the first time in history there are more people living in urban areas than in rural areas. Cities will inevitably grow even larger as climate change drives entire populations from their places of origin. These people forced to leave their homelands are known as environmental migrants: an emerging phenomenon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":10446,"menu_order":58,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"edicion":[206],"class_list":["post-7184","ganadores","type-ganadores","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","edicion-206"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n