A partnership led by the government of Mongolia and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has raised $198 million in commitments towards conservation and sustainable communities, with similar initiatives in up to 20 other countries in the pipeline.

Eternal Mongolia aims to create 14 mln hectares of new protected areas in the country’s grasslands, forests, deserts, wetlands, and rivers through a Project Finance for Permanence (PFP) initiative that includes $71 mln from private and philanthropic donors.

It will strengthen the management of the country’s existing National Protected Areas, covering 47 mln ha, and benefit at least 24,000 households in community-managed practices like sustainable grazing across a further 34 mln ha, TNC said.

The 15-year initiative should help Mongolia fulfil its entire commitment under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to protecting 30% of its land and water by 2030, according to the announcement.

The 47 mln ha area is about the size of California, Ryan Demmy Bidwell, global director of PFP at TNC, told Carbon Pulse.

“The scale of impact this Eternal Mongolia initiative has is, frankly, quite transformative. It will be the largest land and freshwater conservation initiative that TNC has ever been engaged in across our 75-year history.”

“It’s really the sort of scale of engagement that we need to see globally if we’re going to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises at the pace we need.”

A PFP is a partnership agreement between multiple donors and governments, coming together around a strategy to finance a shared conservation and community development plan. The approach has been deployed six times in the past – most recently by the government of Colombia in 2022, Bidwell said.

“Mongolia’s average annual temperature has increased by 2.25C over the last 80 years, more than anywhere else on earth, and we’ve just endured the worst dzud [disaster] year yet, with millions of livestock lost and people’s livelihoods ruined,” Bat-Erdene Bat-Ulzii, Mongolian minister of environment and tourism, said in a statement.

“With Eternal Mongolia, we see a proven tool to tackle the impacts of climate change,” Bat-Ulzii said.

Khomyn steppe in Western Mongolia. Credit: Erdenebulgan, TNC

PIPELINE OF 20 OTHERS

TNC and collaboration group Enduring Earth are working to deploy the PFP approach across as many as “20 countries over the next six years”, Bidwell said, after initially signing up with Mongolia and Gabon in 2022.

Each PFP initiative will look to raise around $200-300 mln towards similar goals of conservation and community development.

“In the near term, we are optimistic that a project in Western Canada led by 17 First Nations governments, in partnership with … the government of British Columbia – the Great Bear Sea – is likely to succeed in reaching an agreement later this summer,” he said.

“TNC is also advancing projects in Kenya and in Gabon. Similar to Mongolia, those initiatives would help those governments achieve their 30% protection.”

These three and six other initiatives aim to close by the end of 2025, including one led by WWF in Namibia and Belize, alongside three other Canadian regions steered by Pew Charitable Trusts, he said.

“There is always a challenge in bringing stakeholders together around a shared vision and strategy for tackling large-scale biodiversity conservation and community development challenges.”

NOMADIC STEWARDSHIP

The funding will be approximately distributed across:

• $15 mln for establishing new protected areas
• $85 mln for more effective management of existing National Protected Areas
• $66 mln in community development activities

While the PFP is only 15 years long – a relatively short period for conservation – $21 mln will go towards trying to sustain benefits in the long term.

The $71 mln from international donors, based mainly in Asia, Europe, and the US, will go towards a fund.

The strategy will be managed by independent trust fund Mongolian Nature’s Legacy Foundation, which has been set up for the PFP. The foundation will directly send the donor financing to local community organisations.

Although US-based, the foundation operates through a Mongolian branch. Chaired by Boldoo Magvan, CEO of the Mongolia Green Finance Corporation, its board will include two directors appointed by the Mongolian government, and one from TNC, according to Akipress.

Mongolian Nature’s Legacy Foundation will also monitor the government’s investments of its separately distributed $127 mln, publicly disclosing annual reports, aiming to ensure “unprecedented transparency”.

Donor funding for tenure and forest guardianship by Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, and local communities increased by a third over the last eight years, though few resources directly reached on-the-ground organisations, a report found this month.

Mongolia’s grasslands are home to 200,000 nomadic herding families.

“The success of Eternal Mongolia is not solely about protecting Mongolia’s landscapes, but doing so in a way that honors and values generations of traditional knowledge while building sustainable livelihoods and futures,” Munkhbat Tserendorj, executive director for NGO Khomyn Talyn Takhi, said.

“Mongolia’s nomadic herding families are … critical to how these protected areas will be maintained for years to come.”

Nomadic community on the Mongolian steepe. Credit: Bayar Balgantseren, TNC

MARKET IMPLICATIONS

The plan is not-for-profit with funding primarily dispersed through grants or contracts, but there will be direct investment in activities that support local community economic development, Bidwell said.

“That could include, for example, capacity building to help communities to design ecotourism operations in Mongolia’s National Protected Areas,” he told Carbon Pulse.

“It could also be investments in more sustainable supply chains for agricultural products, so that herders receive greater benefits from the agricultural production.”

The initiative aims to help people benefit from nature conservation more directly, with more locals involved in decisions, Bidwell said.

Eternal Mongolia could help finance existing Mongolia’s biodiversity offsets policy, though there are no imminent plans for it to feed into carbon financing or voluntary biodiversity credits, he said.

By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com

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