Growing Mongolia’s Protected Area Estate (Mongolia)

Photo Credit: Joe Kiesecker, The Nature Conservancy

In April 2020, the Wyss Foundation provided a $200,000 grant to The Nature Conservancy’s Mongolia Program. The grant helped The Nature Conservancy provide the Government of Mongolia with technical assistance that led the Mongolian Parliament to announce the designation of ten new and expanded protected areas totaling more than 3.2 million acres in May 2020.

In addition to the areas created in May 2020, the Government of Mongolia also created twenty-two new national protected areas totaling 8.6 million acres the previous year; however, some of these new areas lacked management plans, so a portion of the grant to The Nature Conservancy supports inclusive, locally-led land use planning processes for five of these new areas in Dornod Province in Eastern Mongolia.

Mongolia has proven itself to be a world leader in conservation in recent years, having not only secured the protection of many new areas, but also formally adopting a national goal of protecting thirty percent of its landscape by 2030, aligned with the global 30x30 goals of the Wyss Campaign for Nature. These latest protections brought Mongolia’s percentage of protected land to twenty-one percent.