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Kids suffer most in one of Earth’s most polluted cities<\/span><\/em>, National Geographic<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Air pollution was the first major scourge that created the environmental movement. It sometimes gets lost in the discussions about climate change. They’re inter-related in many ways–but this is the point where we point out we’ve covered this at length over the years and our best service to you is to remind that educating oneself is a duty. And a service to one’s survival.<\/p>\n Air pollution is choking the planet in many ways. While improved in some places and some ways–it’s worse than ever in many of the largest population centers and regression is occurring too often elsewhere.<\/p>\n 7 million people die from air pollution every year–9 out of 10 people breath air with high levels of pollutants.<\/em><\/p>\n That’s from the World Health Organization.<\/p>\n And as usual, the children suffer the most.<\/p>\n Coal is a top-of-the-list energy source that needs to be replaced–but there’s no magic fix when survival on other levels depends on it–until or unless there are affordable substitutes. Pondering the reality that we may need to use some sources that are far better in the short-term, even if less than ideal, as we hopefully race to the moon of an age of fully clean energy available to all, is part of the challenge that reality presents. We’ll leave that to your further study as well.<\/p>\n Here’s a case study to connect us to the humanity and reality of what’s happening every day all over the world:<\/p>\n “Kids suffer most in one of Earth’s most polluted cities”<\/a><\/p>\n By Beth Gardiner, photographs and video by Mathieu Paley<\/p>\n National Geographic Magazine, April Issue<\/p>\n In winter, coal stoves and power plants choke Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, with smoke\u2014and lung disease.<\/em><\/p>\n ULAANBAATAR, MONGOLIA–<\/span>Coal is everywhere in Mongolia\u2019s frigid capital. It sits beneath the towering smokestacks of power plants in piles as big as football fields. Drivers haul it through town in the open beds of pickup trucks. Vendors stack yellow bags of the stuff along roadsides, and jagged pieces spill from metal buckets in the round felt yurts where the poorest families burn it to keep out the bitter cold.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The smoke in Ulaanbaatar is at times so thick that people and buildings are visible only in outline. Its smell is acrid and inescapable. The sooty air stings throats and wafts into the gleaming modern office buildings in the center of town and into the blocky, Soviet-style apartment towers that sprawl toward the mountains on the city\u2019s edges. On bad days, handheld pollution monitors max out, as readings soar dozens of times beyond recommended limits. Levels of the tiniest and most dangerous airborne particles, known as PM-2.5, once hit 133 times<\/a> the World Health Organization\u2019s suggested maximum.<\/p>\n Mongolia\u2019s pollution problem is a more severe version of one playing out around the world. From the United States and Germany to India and China, air pollution cuts short an estimated 7 million lives globally every year<\/a>. Coal is one of the major causes<\/a>of dirty air\u2014and of climate change.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In Mongolia, at least for now, coal is essential to surviving the brutal winters. But the toll it takes is steep.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Ulaanbaatar has grown rapidly and in an unplanned way in recent years, as nomadic herders have left the countryside and settled on the city’s outskirts, in districts such as Dari Ekh. Living in gers or simple houses, they use coal stoves for both heating and cooking.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n This winter authorities closed the capital\u2019s schools for two full months, from mid-December to mid-February, <\/b>in a desperate attempt to shield children from the toxic air. It\u2019s unclear how effective that measure is. Hospitals are stretched far beyond capacity, as pneumonia cases, particularly among the youngest, spike every winter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI no longer know what a healthy lung sounds like,\u201d says Ganjargal Demberel, a doctor who makes house calls in a neighborhood of yurts\u2014known in Mongolia as gers<\/i>\u2014tucked into the jagged brown hills in the city\u2019s northeastern corner. \u201cEverybody has bronchitis or some other problem, especially during winter.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n One of Dr. Ganjargal\u2019s patients is Gal-Erdene Sumiya, a shaggy-haired seven-month-old who, when I meet him, is just getting over pneumonia. \u201cI can\u2019t bring him outside to get any air, because it\u2019s so polluted,\u201d says his mother, Selengesaikhan Oyundelger. She keeps her older children inside almost all the time too.<\/p>\n A patterned pink cloth covers the walls of the family\u2019s ger, and the wooden poles that support its round roof are brightly painted, creating a living space that\u2019s cozy and intimate. A small stove keeps it warm as Selengesaikhan rolls out dough for mutton dumplings. She says the other mothers she met when her son was hospitalized talked about pollution incessantly: \u201cThey were saying they had no confidence in the future of this country.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Ger <\/i>districts like hers, a mix of the traditional round tents and simple wood or brick houses, are home mostly to migrants from the countryside, former herders who have come to the capital seeking jobs and education. Because they lack the infrastructure available to apartment dwellers\u2014reliable electricity and district heating systems, as well as water and sanitation\u2014residents shovel coal into small stoves for warmth. A single family easily burns two tons or more each winter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Smoke floats from the metal chimneys that poke up from every tent and house, and the ger <\/i>districts are among the city\u2019s most polluted. But bigger polluters darken Ulaanbaatar\u2019s air as well. Huge black plumes waft from power plants, and smoke drifts too from the chimneys of apartment buildings, supermarkets, and schools where maintenance men heap coal into big boilers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n An air purifier stands watch over napping children at a kindergarten in the Bayanzurkh District. Young children are especially vulnerable to air pollution; the school has a purifier in every room.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n The blanket of foul air that engulfs this city for half the year is both a profound threat to its people\u2019s health and a symptom of a much wider set of failures.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Almost 30 <\/b>years after it ended decades of isolation, rejected communism, and became a democracy, Mongolia remains a nation in transition. It has opened its rich mineral wealth to foreign mining companies that extract gold, copper\u2014and, of course, coal\u2014from the Gobi Desert.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But it faces a tightening knot of problems: As environmental and economic changes have made the old nomadic way of life more tenuous, Ulaanbaatar\u2019s leaders have failed to plan for the mass migration to the capital of rural families who are no longer able to eke out a living tending livestock on the high, windswept steppe. Mongolia is a nation of three million people inhabiting a space almost triple that of France\u2014but nearly half are now crowded into its ever more polluted capital.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Purevkhuu Tserendorj\u2019s family didn\u2019t migrate from the countryside; they returned to Ulaanbaatar in 2015 from Los Angeles, where she and her husband had been studying. They felt the pollution\u2019s effects immediately. Their younger son was a newborn then, and he started coughing only a few days after they landed. Before long, he had pneumonia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Her friends told her their children got it several times a year, and soon her two boys did too. \u201cIt\u2019s normal in Mongolia,\u201d says Purevkhuu, a former television journalist. But she wasn\u2019t prepared to accept such a serious illness as routine. So on Facebook she called for angry parents to gather on Sukhbaatar Square, where a statue of Genghis Khan sits in front of the imposing marble parliament building.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It was December 2016, with temperatures below zero Fahrenheit. \u201cThe mothers couldn\u2019t feel their feet and fingers,\u201d Purvekhuu recalls.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The movement that began that day has grown, but its founder is grappling with an awful dilemma. Her older son, now five, endured eye cancer as a baby in L.A. To protect his health, she and her husband sent him to live temporarily with his grandparents in Washington, D.C., and it\u2019s agonizing to be so far apart. \u201cEvery morning I wake up missing, dreaming about him,\u201d Purvekhuu says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The family is thinking of returning to America. But Purevkhuu has become the face of air quality activism in Mongolia, so she fears the government will let pollution get even worse if she leaves. Staying is hard to contemplate too: \u201cI feel so guilty\u201d about living in Ulaanbaatar, she says. \u201cIt affects my children very badly.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Alex Heikens, UNICEF\u2019s Mongolia representative, believes the air pollution here \u201cis more than a public health crisis.\u201d He sees it as a long-term threat to the nation\u2019s well-being, scarring lungs permanently, impairing children\u2019s brain development and endangering future productivity. \u201cEven if we would stop the pollution now, we go down to zero today, many of these problems are already built into the health of the population,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Even inside schools and hospitals, Heikens says, pollution levels are off the charts. \u201cIn the maternity wards, a baby is born: First breath of air is 600 micrograms per cubic meter PM2.5\u201d\u201424 times the acceptable level. \u201cThat\u2019s not a good start of your life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So far, the official response has been ineffectual, and many Mongolians have begun to see it through a wider lens. Anger over revelations of official corruption<\/a> has roiled politics in recent months, toppling the parliamentary speaker in January.<\/p>\n The word Manan<\/i> is a mashup of the two main parties\u2019 names, and critics use it to imply that there\u2019s little difference between them, that both sides put personal interests first. The word also means \u201cfog,\u201d so it alludes to the lack of transparency that hides official misdeeds. And these days, Manan also refers to the unnatural fog of pollution.<\/p>\n That fog, says economist Jargal Dambadarjaa, \u201cis becoming thicker and thicker.\u201d Politicians \u201care not serving the people they\u2019re supposed to serve. Instead they\u2019re serving the people who are financing them.\u201d But now Mongolians are getting mad. \u201cI hope very much that we will clean the house relatively shortly.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When it comes to pollution, experts say the remedy should start with providing better services to the ger <\/i>districts, whose residents are both a big cause and the worst victims of pollution. One study <\/b>found ger <\/i>district children had lung capacity 40 percent smaller<\/a> than kids in the countryside\u2014a red flag for long-term health problems.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n While the ger districts have grown rapidly in recent years, they have been part of Ulaanbaatar for decades, and officials have neglected to provide even basic infrastructure. Ger <\/i>families have enough electricity for light bulbs and a few appliances, but neither grid connections nor the city\u2019s power supply are sufficient for them to switch to electric heating.<\/p>\n Although most of Mongolia\u2019s electricity comes from coal, at least big plants can be regulated, and their smoke treated, says Regdel Duger, president of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. Insulating gers <\/i>could halve the energy needed to heat each one, he added. He recommended the government provide loans to help ger owners fund such improvements.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Recently, officials have sought to limit the ger <\/i>districts\u2019 growth by temporarily barring new migrants from coming to the city unless they can afford to buy or rent a home. \u201cIf you are going to move into the ger <\/i>district and add more stoves,\u201d says Deputy Mayor Batbayasgalan Jantsan, \u201cthen I\u2019m sorry, we will not receive you.\u201d Officials may introduce a fee for new arrivals when the migration ban expires, he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Many migrants, though, simply come illegally. The forces driving Mongolia\u2019s urbanization are powerful. Young people are pulled to the capital, as to cities around the world, by the prospect of jobs or better schooling.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But Mongolia\u2019s nomads are also being pushed off the land, as mining accelerates desertification of grasslands, through the mines\u2019 heavy groundwater use and destruction of vegetation. Meanwhile climate change is increasing the frequency of the one-two punch of harsh weather known as the dzud<\/i>: a dry summer followed by an even colder than normal winter. That decimates livestock and livelihoods.<\/p>\n Even goats add to the trouble: Herders raise them for lucrative cashmere, but unlike camels, horses, and cows, they rip up plants by the roots, degrading pastures and ensnaring their owners in debt.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Beyond efforts to curb migration, the government is also planning a shift to a higher-grade coal, barring the dirtiest grade of the fuel from entering the city starting in May. Tsogtbaatar Byambaa, a Ministry of Health official, expects that to help, but he knows there is far more to do.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe magnitude of this issue is here,\u201d he says, raising one hand high. \u201cWhat we might be doing is here,\u201d gesturing lower with the other. \u201cWe need to bring those closer.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Much of the low-grade coal that fills Ulaanbaatar\u2019s stoves, and that the government is outlawing, comes from Nalaikh, on the outskirts of the city. A state-owned company ran mining operations there until it collapsed in the 1990s. Now locals work the dozens of informal, unregulated holes that pock the landscape beneath the hulking shells of abandoned buildings.<\/p>\n Muhammad Ashimset is only 18, but he\u2019s been doing 12-hour shifts underground for three years. Each morning, he climbs into a battered metal bucket the size and shape of a bathtub, and as the cable holding it unspools, slides down a 200-foot-deep shaft. He and his co-workers send the big bucket up full, and crews shovel the coal into pickup trucks bound for the city.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Soon that trade will end\u2014legally, anyway. In the warm ger <\/i>where the miners shelter from the bitter wind during breaks, they say they hope there will be new jobs for them if these mines are forced to close when the law requiring higher-grade coal kicks in.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n As another dust-covered miner pours salty milk tea into plastic bowls, Murat Ahambek says he understands the rationale behind that rule. After all, his family feels the effects of air pollution too. \u201cMy wife and my daughter, when they go home in the evening, they constantly cough,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Many observers, though, doubt the move to refined coal will ease such symptoms. Sukhgerel Dugersuren, chair of a mining oversight group called Oyu Tolgoi Watch, says it\u2019s long past time for Mongolia to shift away from coal altogether, not just to slightly better coal. But she sees little sign of the political will to make that happen.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThere is reluctance to take on new things, or maybe just no capacity,\u201d she says of government officials who are invested\u2014both financially and intellectually\u2014in the toxic fuel, and uninterested in renewable energy, despite Mongolia\u2019s rich resources of wind and sunshine. \u201cThe people are old, their education is old, the mentality. They\u2019re kind of stuck in that box.\u201d<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, she says, Chinese money <\/b>is readily available to finance coal mines and power plants\u2014but not clean energy. While China has invested heavily in renewable power at home, it remains dependent on coal and has been eager to tap Mongolia\u2019s rich resources.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cUlaanbaatar is already suffocating from its coal use,\u201d Sukhgerel says, but she fears \u201cthe way the planning is going, there\u2019s going to be more [coal-fired] power plants. There\u2019s going to be more coal burned here.\u201d<\/p>\n Beth Gardiner<\/a> is a London-based journalist and the author of Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution<\/a><\/i>.<\/p>\n Matthieu Paley<\/a> is a photographer and frequent contributor to National Geographic. Follow him on Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\u201cI no longer know what a healthy lung sounds like\u201d<\/b><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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Parents do what they can to protect their children from the smog. Here a mother adjusts her son’s mask before he leaves the family ger to walk to school.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n![\"Mongolian](\"https:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.com\/content\/dam\/environment\/2019\/03\/mongolia-air-pollution\/mongolia-air-pollution-15.adapt.133.1.jpg)
\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\u201cI feel so guilty\u201d<\/b><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\u201cThey\u2019re stuck in that box\u201d<\/b><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n
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