Tag Archives: Steve Frisch

Guest blog: Steve Frisch on Environmental Governance

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Mongolian youth look to lead on environmental governance

Mongolian Coat of Arms

Mongolian Coat of Arms

Probably the most frequent question I fielded from Mongolian students was “what can we learn from your experience that will help us leap ahead? How do we create a system that allows for economic prosperity but respects and protects the environment?”

Environmental governance is the set of rules and practices that govern the use and allocation of natural resources. These rules can be embedded in legal codes or they can be more informal, cultural and behavioral factors.

In the United States we take a well-established legal system of environmental governance for granted. US systems were established gradually as resource conflicts led to a body of law to resolve dispute. Eventually this led to the passage of the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act and numerous other regulatory policies, all studied and understood by our intrepid Mongolian students. In Mongolia, because property rights were not a founding principle of government from 1920-1990, and pressure on resources was light, many of these rules and practices were embedded in cultural values. As pressure on resources is increasing they sense the opportunity to establish a legal system that avoids many of the pitfalls of the US system.

The issue that seemed to fascinate many Mongolian students was the establishment in US law of the “public trust doctrine”, or the principle that certain resources—such as clean air and water, species, and perhaps even cultural landscapes—are public or common resources, and that government has a primary required role in maintaining them for the public’s use. While I was in Mongolia this very issue was being debated and decided by the Mongolian Supreme Court, which eventually found that citizens have a right to sue on behalf of the environment if government fails to protect it.

The other environmental governance issue that fascinated students is the idea of ecological debt. Ecological debt is the concept that the right to a healthy environment is a fundamental right, and exploitation of the planet’s resources by industrialized countries at the expense of undeveloped countries is a breach of those rights. This right is further breached by the fact we now face a global climate crisis and the only way to mitigate impacts is to de-carbonize our economies. Since industrialized nations built their wealth on cheap and abundant carbon based fuels, what debt do we owe to developing countries for monopolizing these resources?

Rapidly developing nations like India and Brazil, seeing them selves shifting from under-developed to developed nations, are hesitant to endorse rapid cuts to carbon emissions. Instead they are joining the ranks of the nations that owe the ecological debt—the group of 17 most industrialized nations who account for the vast majority of global GHG emissions—and are balking. Nations like Mongolia are saying that the wealthier developed nations ought to carry the bulk of the fiscal burden. Western and emerging economies say that the funds will need to come from taxes on the private sector and no one has the political will to make the case while their economies are still languishing under slow growth and debt crises.

I suspect that the answer probably lies with our altruistic, optimistic, innovation hungry, barrier leaping students, like those I was so fortunate to meet during my time in Mongolia, rather than the bankers, and bureaucrats who have taken over my generation.

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Guest blog: Steve Frisch on Mongolia’s Student Leaders

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“Mongolia’s student leaders aspire to leap past developed countries on climate issues”

Steve Frisch with Mongolian Student Leaders (Photo courtesy of Sierra Business Council)

Steve Frisch with Mongolian Student Leaders (Photo courtesy of Sierra Business Council)

Conversation with students and faculty at the National University of Mongolia, the oldest university in Mongolia established in 1942, and the Mongolian University of Science and Technology, was dominated by the topic of climate change and environmental governance. Students were engaged, well informed about global and local climate issues, and generally optimistic about the future. This attitude was remarkably refreshing compared to working with students in the developed world who are generally optimistic but expressing growing concern about slow progress due to lack of political will. Mongolian students are invigorated by the opportunity to plan a strategy to address climate change from the ground up, express optimism about government support, and are looking for ways to leap over barriers that have emerged in developed economies.

All of which is important, because Mongolia’s climate is undergoing radical change. A recent national analysis of temperature records shows an increase of 2.14 degree Celsius (3.85 F) since the 1940’s. Analysis by the World Wildlife Fund finds extreme weather events increasing with increased incidents of drought, cold weather events (called Dzud), heat waves, flood and sand storms. Temperatures are projected to continue to rise leading to melting glaciers that feed many Mongolian lakes and shrinking groundwater supplies affecting grazing. Finally, desertification, particularly in the Gobi region, due to shortage of water and precipitation is a serious problem.

Many of the students I spoke with experienced these extreme weather events personally. Several were from families that lost large portions of their herds in the Dzud of 2010, just one of three Dzud’s in the last decade. Temperatures dropped to minus 50 Celcius (minus 58 F) and heavy snows made grazing almost impossible, killing 50% of the livestock nationally, about 2.5 million head of goats, sheep, yak and cattle. Others from the Gobi region relay stories of dust storms and expansion of the desert driving migration to cities. Many migrants end up in temporary housing, trying to find jobs, commuting long hours, and disconnected from traditional nomadic ways of life. For many of the students, children of climate migrants, it led to a conscious decision to rapidly embrace a global economy and use education as the launching pad to opportunity and prosperity.

These factors are leading Mongolia to look for new models to help them manage adaptation and mitigation of climate change. Mongolia is a participant in the Kyoto Protocol, and has done substantive preparatory work to guide policy, including conducting a greenhouse gas emission inventory for a 1990 base year so they can measure future progress, adopting a National Action Program on Climate Change in 1999, and participating in several climate assessments over the last decade. In recent years Mongolia has undergone a process to identify and designate about 1/3 of its total landmass as permanent public lands and National Parks, modeled partly on the US system, which will allow for the large landscape resilience necessary for adaptation to occur.

Mongolian students and young people seemed uniformly anxious to get to climate solutions. They were remarkably frank about their belief that climate change skepticism is largely a western and predominantly American phenomenon.

Tomorrow: The most frequent question I fielded from Mongolian students was “what can we learn from your experience that will help us leap ahead? How do we create an environmental governance system that allows for economic prosperity but respects and protects the environment?”

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Steve Frisch: sfrisch@sbcouncil.org

Guest Blog: Steve Frisch on Ninja Mining in Mongolia

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Ninja Gold Miner, June 19, 2010 (Photo courtest of chenyingphoto)

Ninja Gold Miner, June 19, 2010 (Photo courtest of chenyingphoto)

In the Northern Lakes region of Mongolia, where the Selenge River flows to the world’s largest freshwater lake, Lake Baikal in Russia, 2007 Goldman Environmental Prize winner Tsetsegee Munkhbayer led a small group of Mongolian citizens into a confrontation with several mining companies. Fortunately nobody was injured when the citizens opened fire on mining equipment, but the incident is emblematic of the tension globalization can bring.

But there’is another side to the mining story: At the same time that large-scale mining is advancing in some areas, small scale, unpermitted, and almost impossible to regulate artisanal mining, or ‘ninja-mining’, is going on across the country. Local residents are importing mercury from China to process hand dug gold ore and produce gold for sale on the international market. This practice often leaves in its wake mercury poisoning in waterways and fisheries, exposure to other heavy metals and toxins like asbestos and arsenic, and degradation of land.

Ninja mining releases mercury into the environment during processing; first when metallic mercury is used to wash and concentrate gold and small amounts are washed out along with tailings and sediment, second when mercury vapors are created during the burning process—isolated ore is burned to evaporate the mercury and leave the concentrated gold behind—and inhalation occurs, or the same pots used to separate mercury and gold are used for cooking. One United Nations study estimates that one or two grams of metallic mercury are lost for every gram of gold produced. Once mercury is released into waterways, it enters the food chain through the digestion of bacteria and becomes the far more toxic – methylmercury. Methylmercury bio-accumulates in the food chain and is ingested by residents of downstream communities as they eat contaminated fish.

Our meetings with the State Secretary of the Ministry of Nature, Tourism and the Environment demonstrated that not only are they acutely aware of these problems, they are struggling with how to address them on national level, in a way that recognizes the environmental trade-offs required and endemic in the system. This dichotomy of opportunity and risk remained on many issues for most of my week in Mongolia.

Our first meetings were with the State Secretary of Ministry of Nature, Tourism and the Environment, Nantsag Batsuuri, who briefed us on current conditions, the mandate of his Ministry, and some of the opportunities and risks he see’s in Mongolia’s future. My first impression was that Mr. Batsuuri was deeply committed to his people’s history of closeness to the land, respect for the environment, and cultural practices.

Current conditions included the recent conclusion of negotiations with international mining conglomerates Rio Tinto and subsidiary Ivanhoe Mines on the development of the $4.6 billion project, resulting in a 34% share of the mine being owned by the Mongolian government. Proceeds from the investment are difficult to project, but the project is expected to account for more than 30% of Mongolia’s GDP in 2014, and lead to a massive increase in revenue for the government. But local Gobi residents have objected strenuously to mercury pollution, as well as the loss of ancestral grazing lands, native fisheries, and traditional cultural practices.

Tomorrow: Meeting with students and faculty at the National University of Mongolia to discuss climate change and environmental governance.

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Steve Frisch: sfrisch@sbcouncil.org

Guest Blog: Steven Frisch’s Trip to Mongolia

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Steve Frisch, President of Sierra Business Council (Courtesy Photo)

Steve Frisch, President of Sierra Business Council (Courtesy Photo)

Steven Frisch is the President of the Sierra Business Council, a regional business based non-profit organization dedicated to advancing new approaches to create vital communities, promote environmental quality, and increase the economic prosperity of the Sierra Nevada. Sierra Business Council specializes in solving difficult social and environmental problems by applying the principles of business and entrepreneurship. Over the last 17 years the business council has leveraged more than $100 million in investment in the Sierra Nevada, trained more than 400 community leaders, and protected more than 40,000 acres of working farms, ranches and forests.  Read the first of Steve’s guest blogs below!  

Flying into the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar I immediately sensed opportunity.

Mongolia is at the forefront of the emerging global economy; rooted in its sense of history, one of the last places on earth where a quarter of its population still lives a traditional nomadic herdsman’s life style, simultaneously thrust into the hyper-world of developing resources, access to global markets and rapid GDP growth. Opportunity is expressed in the spirit of its people, aware of Mongolia’s history of empire, proud of its deep connection to the land, investing in its infrastructure and improving services and committed to providing its young people an opportunity to learn and prosper.

But globalization is both an opportunity and a risk in this beautiful, semi-arid, pastoral country of 2.5 million people. Half of the population lives in the capital city, and half in a land area roughly 1.56 million square kilometers, roughly equivalent to. Mongolia sits landlocked squarely between two of the worlds largest emergent, some would say dominant, economies, China and Russia. Mongolia has the good fortune to contain amongst the worlds richest deposits of gold, silver, copper, coal, uranium, and reputedly rare earth critical to the manufacture of electronics.

Mongolia (Courtesy Photo)

Mongolia (Courtesy Photo)

The opportunity is exemplified by the fact that Mongolia’s GDP has grown at a 10% annual rate for most of the last decade, with much of the excess pouting into infrastructure like roads, airports, water systems, electrical grids, and education. GDP is projected to quadruple in the next 5 years after the opening of one of the largest copper-gold mining districts in the world, the Oyu Tolgoi, located in southern Mongolia near the border with China in the great Gobi desert.

The risk comes with the challenge of managing rapid economic growth, dislocation of peoples as they urbanize in the quest for a more prosperous life, and the environmental impacts associated with a resource extraction economy. The main reason I traveled to Mongolia was to share Sierra Business Council’s approach to addressing the issue of balancing rapid growth and resource extraction with stewardship of cultural and natural resources and the development of a sustainable economy.

Mongolia and the American intermountain west share many similarities. Both are regions with a history of indigenous nomadic peoples with a strong independent culture and respect for the land. Both are pastoral, supporting large grazing populations dependent upon water for life. Both are vast regions with isolated communities. Both possess an abundance of mineral resources highly desirable by emerging economies.

The American inter-mountain west history of mineral extraction began in earnest with the discovery of gold in California in 1849 and continues to this day with large-scale mining in most western states. But what we learned from this 19th century experience—after the near extirpation of native cultures, diversion of water and fouling of watersheds for mineral extraction and hydraulic mining, boom and bust economic cycles creating cities and leaving ghost towns, and the regions wealth leaving the west and creating fortunes on Wall Street—was that there is no substitute for a sustainable economy that respects the “place”, and the cost of restoring it is high indeed. This is the message we, my State Department hosts Susan Russell and Allyson Algeo, brought to the first few days of meetings in Mongolia.

I’ll continue the story on Sierra Business Council’s website: www.sbcouncil.org and via our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/SierraBusinessCouncil. Also check out our Twitter feed: @sierrabusiness. Please connect with us if you’d like to hear more, discuss further, or get involved!