Dust storms regularly affect northern China, including its capital Beijing. In recent years, Chinese scientists and officials have traced the source of the dust storms to its neighbour Mongolia.

Much of the dust over Beijing in the spring of 2023, for example, originated from parts of Mongolia, seemingly driven by the warming and drying of the climate in the region.

Mongolia’s environment has come to be seen as China’s problem. Chinese netizens have blamed Mongolia’s herders and miners for the exploitation of natural resources and environmental destruction.

In pointing the finger at Mongolians, they ignore the role that Chinese demand for Mongolian resources plays in Mongolia’s environmental problems. In the south of Mongolia, it is dust churned up by mining trucks carrying coal to China on unpaved roads that locals are concerned about.

In August 2026, a major UN conference will be held in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital, on the subject of tackling desertification. According to the Mongolian organisers of the conference, the country is one of the most severely affected by this process, whereby fertile land becomes like a desert and vegetation disappears, with almost 77% of its land now classified as degraded.

In recent years, China has sought to export its own expertise in preventing and tackling desertification to Mongolia, and this conference will provide a platform for China to showcase its global leadership on tackling this phenomenon.

Questions remain, however, about how Chinese anti-desertification measures might work within Mongolia. In China, for instance, these measures have........

© The Conversation