 I'm Natasha Fine, I'm a research fellow from the School of Archaeology and Anthropology here at the ANU. I've written a book on Mongolia and I spent a year in Mongolia living with herders and my book's called Living with Herds, Human-Animal Co-existence in Mongolia and I'm here to introduce the next speaker, Mr Tsokbaatar. He would know the ANU because he studied international law here at the ANU and he has also received a master's degree in political science in Russia so he knows both Russian and English. Between 2002 and 2008 he was the foreign policy adviser to two presidents. In 2011 he was appointed the State Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Mongolia. And just recently in 2012 he was appointed the Minister for Nature, Environment and Tourism. Today he will be speaking to us about environmental issues in Mongolia today. Well Natasha, thank you and I would rather have you continue your talk about Mongolia rather than me talking about Mongolia. Well it's really good to be back. When I left Australian National University I told to myself I'll be back and I'm back. Well really Australian National University is for me a second home. It is the place, sublime place where I really learnt and acquired academic knowledge and besides that I also had an excellent opportunity to immerse into western culture. I had a couple of interesting, I couldn't help grinning when I remembered some of the funny situations where I found myself when I first came to Australia. First actually the government brought me in one month before my classes started and I thought why on earth they had to bring me before, one month before. And then during the course I realised that they brought me to prevent me from falling into cultural shock. And that shocked me. So it didn't prevent me from cultural shock. On the contrary it sent me to cultural shock because I really was shocked by the fact that Australian government at the taxpayers money was thinking of me and Mongolian so that I do not fall into cultural shock. If at that time in the early 90s I talked about this in Mongolia and I would talk about cultural shock, in Mongolia I would be perceived as a cry mum's baby. So that was really shocking to be that humane to think about a person when they come over to a foreign land to help him to introduce himself smoothly into the different culture was very human centric to me. Another shock that I got was when I first got my telephone bill from Telstra and Optus. At that time again in the middle of 90s Mongolia still had only one state monopoly telephone services company so therefore I had one phone. I didn't realise that there were two bill providing companies. So I was using both codes calling home a lot and then I got two bills. The amount required was about the same and then I thought it must be the same because the pocket must be the same you know as in Mongolia. Two companies but the pocket must be the government or anyway it should be the same. So I paid Telstra bill and I didn't pay Optus bill. One day Optus operator calls me and says sir you have to pay the bill and I say I paid the bill and I pulled out my Telstra bill started explaining everything and the Optus operator says sir this is Telstra bill and I say yes it is my telephone bill and I paid it and he said but still it's Telstra bill so we couldn't find our common language and then the next month I get a lawyer's letter saying that if you do not pay you will end up going into court and paying much more than what you had to pay and I immediately paid and then I realised God there are two different companies Optus and Telstra and the third shock was when I first found out that Sara Lee's frozen cheesecake is not ice cream because to me coming from a country where ice cream was produced only by one company every frozen sweet dairy product was an ice cream but later on I realised that it was still a cake not an ice cream Well that was a couple of cultural shocks that I actually first experienced Well I'm invited here to talk about post mining environmental reclamation pretty specific subject and it's quite interesting you know life is really full of surprises Munga Chire and me you know we work in secure Mr Bolt and Gamble we all you know work all had something to do with the security and diplomacy and now I'm here talking about environment and not only environment but post mining environmental reclamation which is a very interesting specific subject Well post mining environmental reclamation is a pretty novel field in Mungo Why did we not think about mining closures? Well you know jokingly one could probably say that we're an open democracy and we're open people and therefore we think only about opening mines Closing is for somebody else you know it will happen in 60 years and somebody else will be doing it but without a joke it was something of that kind that prevented us from really thinking ahead of mining closures because up until now we had pretty limited number of mines under socialism when the number of mines increased in the last 20 years but still 20 years is pretty short time for developing a mine and therefore mostly we were talking about opening the mines rather than closing and that is the reason why this post mining environmental reclamation is a pretty novel thing and one could really think that well besides this 20 years is short period of time why also we ended up with this system I will try to offer a couple of answers to that First of all environment itself is a novel idea for humanity only in the 70s we started talking about the environment in a serious manner and besides that we were a communist country for the last 80 years and in communism environment by definition was a secondary issue because in communism the major motto is to build a society where you can get whatever you want at the extent that you need and you will be at the end contributing whatever that you can in other words imagine that I'm not a very big consumerist person but if they give me an opportunity to acquire shoes in accordance with my needs then I don't know how many shoes I would be ready to get so in other words to sustain that sort of production you can imagine how massive big production scales communism was entailing itself in itself and therefore this environment was secondary because it was a really materialistic society which was really intending to provide as much as possible and almost for free so that was the basic concept in communism that apparently had to do with the fact that environmental rules were pretty lapse besides that of course socialist system had very outdated technology and that we inherited when we started transiting into the new society and this outdated technology was one of the factors that contributed to the system that we ended up with where we do not really quite thought of post-mining closures and another factor that contributed to the fact to this lapse of environmental rules is a weak environmental rules is natural riches it spoils people because in Mongolia where you have 2.7 million people and 1.5 million square kilometres we basically thought that natural resources were not finite that it won't exhaust at one point therefore the approach to the resources was that they were there for us we didn't realise that we were part of it so just to give an example under socialism we had timber industry and a lot of timber factories were there if you collect the capacity of all of these factories together they still could not work at its full capacity after using all of the forests of Mongolia so that was the approach that we inherited from socialism now besides this socialism thing another thing that contributed to our lapse of environmental regulations up until recent times was transition when we started transition to market economy the economy collapsed and middle of the 90s were very difficult years and the top priority was to make sure that we pulled people out of poverty and as long as a Mongolian was making a buck nothing else mattered so therefore for example at that time we introduced a law that said that a lot of forest fires we had and fallen trees under fire we allowed or at that time the government passed the law that allowed export of burnt trees what happened within one year in 1996 we had 217 fires people simply went out and started setting fire to the forests so in other words at that time the mentality was to help Mongolians to exploit the natural resources so that they avoid poverty and there was quite logical approach at that time but the interesting thing is that as a result of this when these policies went on for 20 years where we ended up was a horrible picture of the environment that we have today for example if you take only the we recently passed a very populist law of protecting water resources the law itself is pretty populist but the environmental purpose of it quite understandable as well and under that law we evaluated that there was only under that law there was 600 square kilometers of land there was degraded to the extent that the damages were extending at 1 billion US dollars now 600 square kilometers again for the Mongolians it's nothing the country is 1.5 million square kilometers but 600 square kilometers is a territory of the size of Singapore where 5 million people live so the territory where 5 million people could build up a country of Singapore we have totally mining degraded area so in other words unless we change our perspective and start understanding what is the value that we're losing if we keep looking at it from a traditional perspective of vast territory then we can end up with a totally degraded country in a very near future just to give you another example 30,000 square kilometers of forest has been subjected to series environmental degradation again 30,000 square kilometers is not a big fraction of a percent of the territory of Mongolia but it's 30 times Hong Kong hosting the people 7 million people again it's gone the forests are gone in that area it's one territory of Belgium so I'm not even talking about 70% of Mongolia's territory subject to a certain degree of desertification I don't know how many Belgians Singapores, Hong Kongs it will be but this big vast resource rich territory is under certain degradation already so whenever we talk today about environmental problems our economy is not in many respects is not global many statistical figures still would be pretty small except for mining town togo or utogo the rest of the industries will be pretty small but when we talk about environmental degradation and pollution the figures that you see will be pretty global pretty big for example when we are looking at the rivers and creeks that are lost over the last 20 to 30 years we lost 5,000 rivers now if an Israeli hears about this it would be a tragedy for them loss of one river is already a serious loss or any country in the Middle East if you tell them that 5,000 rivers and creeks are gone that would be a disaster so in other words it is time for us to realise not to look into these problems from the sides of your territory but to look into these problems how bigger it can become if we do not take action today so due to the above approaches and the funny thing the dichotomy of the situation is that traditionally Mongolians are great environmentalists if somebody asks me has humanity ever had sustainable development pattern and model in the world I would say Mongolia because the nomadic traditional culture was exactly based on the fact that nomads understood that natural resources were finite and natural resources has this magic capacity of regenerating at certain rate so unless you build your consumption pattern within that frame of regeneration in the longer run you are gone so therefore that was the very fundamental understanding of nomadic culture which transcended over the times and passed on to our generation the land and the nature it was for thousands of years many generations lived on the Mongolian territory and they lived as if they never lived so that was the traditional approach for example Chinggisang many people think that he was a conqueror to me he was the first green king in the world because in his law he first passed the law that prohibited pollution of water resources well the punishment was pretty severe not proportionate to the offence if you polluted the river you would be beheaded easy but still it was a pretty green law and if we really value our traditional approach and change today there is a hope that we will prevent further environmental degradation now what do we need to do in order to change the situation first many of our speakers today were talking about mentality change of mentality and change of recently developed mentality so bringing in the forgotten nomadic environmental culture and then basing on this building a new environmental sense and environmental culture that would be the rescuer and saver of Mongolia in the long run so out of our 20 years of past history when we really in a more extensive and intensive way degraded our natural environment I would want to outline two major postulates that we should remember one thing is that the smallest and poorest nation in the world today is powerful enough to destroy its environment you may not be powerful to create prosperous economy to be a leading nation but still having no power to do that you would be powerful enough to destroy your own environment that's one of the dimensions just on the example that I previously mentioned slightly I can try to explain this again on the example of Mongolia on the territory of Mongolia we never had population that exceeds 3 million people for at least 3,000 years people you know the size of 3 million people lived but the same number of people 2.7 million people within 20 years have destroyed the environment to the extent that no other generation in 3,000 years never did so what it shows is that in today's world even if you're poor you're still equipped with the powerful technologies and knowledge that can destroy your very own home so that requires a new approach that is the postulate that we should always remember second postulate I really want to outline here is that no country however poor it is you know no poor country that there is no poor country that cannot afford to pursue sound environmental policies in other words poverty is not a justification for ruining your environment on the basis of these two maxims of postulates we can change our approach in Mongolia to the environment in other words still our budget is not big enough to pull the whole country out 30% of the population is still in poverty so still we need money for poverty eradication purposes but still that is not justification to put environment aside so therefore the lesson that we learned is that we can afford to protect our environment and we're not small to protect our environment and we can do this so if that proposition is true then what is the policy that we really should stick to of course sustainable development we do not need to create a will that will is already created by the world community and this concept of sustainable development is a totally new approach and tool that is going to ensure long term development of Mongolia but the funny thing is that when we're talking about sustainable development still many policy makers in Mongolia confuse two things when they're talking about sustainable development because still in Mongolia economic development and growth is a priority people think about sustainable economic growth but economic growth by its own definition is not sustainable it's cyclical so you cannot achieve the sustainability but if you do not really invest into the environment today at one point of progress when the environmental resources are finished then the whole development pattern collapses and there is no cycle already there is only downward cycle that is left and that's what we call sustainability so from that perspective it is very important to introduce that concept from that perspective into our regulations that sustainability is about long term growth pattern rather than its existing centric growth pattern rather than just economic growth so once we introduce this different mentality then what we need to do in order to implement this already new approach into the life so that we get a better environmental environment environmental regulations as well recently we passed a new set of laws and in those new set of laws the fundamental change is the fundamental approach to the environment and there we brought in this modern concepts of internalising the costs making the polluters pay so surprisingly although the world community was talking about this for the last 40 years it was not in our laws because that fundamental value was not in the laws we had these lapse rules and regulations which ended up in the environmental degradation we also introduced in this new set of laws adequate level of fees and payments for the use of environmental resources because another fundamental thing that we learned is that in order to protect environment you need money having heart and political commitment does not solve the problem you have to have a constant source of money that flows into the budget that secures the investment back into the environment so therefore we introduced a whole new set of rules that is designed to ensure flow of financing the surprising thing was that up until recently when we got this new set of laws passed the richest multinational companies in the world for their use of water were paying six times less price for water than the poorest citizen in Mongolia was paying per liter of water and that was the discrepancy and we really changed it in a reverse manner you know the companies and commercial polluters pay much more and adequately not excessively paid but adequately so that we could later on protect our environment another thing that we need to think and that's my view instead of purely thinking about the economy we have to think of new dimensions and we had this economists today talk and what I would propose is that we start thinking from the perspective of eco-economy or envir economy in other words economy should not be just economy by itself but economy has to or environment has to become part of the economy and what it means to me is this for example when we're talking about GDP so governments do a very easy tricky job they put a lot of prices fees on the private sector saying that you're the polluters you guys have to pay but government forgets that it is itself also a polluter so it should be changing its own attitude consumption patterns as well and even when they're calculating gross domestic product for example they should be calculating it with the eco-discount for example last year 17.5% growth Mr Gergelsachan talked about 15% inflation and therefore the real growth is maybe 2% or something but if we include into that this environmental cost then think about the growth where we end up so therefore this environmental cost has to be internalised because if we do not internalise environment will come to us and it will internalise itself anyway so therefore in order to be a better planners we really have to internalise it also we have to look into this if we're talking about eco-economy or in the economy then we should be thinking about this new correlation between growth and pollution the danger if we do not put in place right environmental mechanisms then the growth of the economy today may end up with multiple factors of pollution than the growth so if your economy grew two times your pollution if the right mechanisms are there are not there your pollution may end up growing four times so this correlation also should be now research and more data should be developed on that more environmental dimension research should be included into every statistical survey for example what I really think is that when we're talking about demographics also environmental dimension should be put in there for example I'll give you a simple example if we talked about now everybody when they're talking about Chinese demographics policy people agree people think people criticise but in the longer term today we're grinning but in the longer term in 200 years probably we will end up with this policy at the global level because what we're having today is that agricultural lands expansion limits are almost at the highest maximum potential but the population growth is exponential 600 days ago we would be talking about 6 billion people 600 days after already we're talking about 7 billion people so if the agricultural lands development limits are almost there and there is no limit to the growth of the population unless we ourselves put limits into it we will be again putting great global pressure on this so in other words what I really try to say is that this envir economy or eco economy whatever you call it has to be put in place so that we really start projecting about our future and planning our future in the long term so given this environmental situation in Mongolia what is the situation then with the mining post mining rehabilitation because we didn't think of closing the mines we really understandably have one or two sentences in the law that really deals with the mining closure and you know the situation gets exacerbated by the combination of many factors now I'll just give you a recycle of all the factors that I told above total mentality and policy which is not adequate and reflecting today's realities plus low public awareness low technologies plus corruption that our friends today mentioned about this plus weakness in the capacity of government officers, private sector and environmental community in the knowledge of environment in addition to that misconception about the mining industry interesting thing about the misconception again when you open a mine most of the thing people plan that this mine will be operating to the end of the resource it will end only when we extract the natural resource and then it's over but more than half of the mines are closed due to the economic reasons economic crisis the prices are not right most of the mines get closed because of this not because of the exhaustion of natural resources and that is again this misconception is there and therefore our laws and regulations do not reflect this at all so then in empirical terms in data terms where we ended up in terms of post mining rehabilitation we have now for example 530 abandoned gold mines and again people 530 may not sound big but it is almost double the number of mining companies in Mongolia in other words per company you have two abandoned fields in the western country one abandoned field for one company is a disaster for the whole industry but in Mongolia statistically you have two abandoned places per one company and that is a disaster situation another thing is that for example if we take poisoning poisoning with mercury and cyanide one of the most fatal chemical substances we have occurrences of this 37 summons in 9 provinces again in the western country where you have strong post mining regulations one is already too many with these chemicals but you have 37 summons 37 different places in 9 imams so that is really the catastrophic situation that we will have to regulate when we pass a new rule so the answer how do we then overcome this dangerous situation of course we will have to put in place a new set of laws on post mining rehabilitation and not only general provisions should be there but very strict for example today generally a company develops environmental rehabilitation plan for one year so every year they pass this plan work and they put aside 50% of the budget money into the account of the government and then if three years down the road all of a sudden they think the government is left with nothing only with one year money but the guys have been working there for three years so at the end it ends up financing or it will have to finance itself or find that company and make it pay if it's not bankrupt so therefore even this 50% money put aside for annual budgets is not nearly enough but you will be facing at the moment of closing the mines we do not have insurance system in case of foreclosures again with the money system or financing system that we have today we cannot cover so if we have this insurance system the companies along with the insurance companies can do a lot of stuff to rehabilitate the environment now another thing weakness in today's legislation is that there is no requirement to monitor after the rehabilitation so what happens is that when you are closing the mine for example Canadian green into the goblin you plant it when the inspection agency comes you water it you have beautiful green area in the middle of the desert the job is done in the years time Canadian green doesn't grow in the desert environment so therefore you have to have the system that monitors whether the rehabilitation work is surviving the natural environment after the rehabilitation project has been implemented another risky thing in today's legislation is that there is un-clarity related to the passage of title over the project so if in the middle of the project you divided your company and then transferred the title then it is not clear which one of the two will end up with this post-mining rehabilitation or if you pledge the license in the bank then the bank that could potentially later on can become the owner of the license by the law is not obligated to invest into post-mining rehabilitation and that is the system that we have today and these are the weaknesses that we will have to address otherwise up until now probably we didn't have many minds which are properly closed but in the nearest four or five years we will be having many minds in many new fields closed for example Mongolia is a pretty familiar with coal properties there will be very soon minds in the floor spark that will get closed iron minds will be closed so there will be many many types of minds rare earth matter related minds will be closed etc and if these new minds all of them will have will have to have new standards adequate standards that fit these new minds itself so all of these new standards new regulations will have to be passed as soon as possible in order to avoid a possible pile of piles and piles of new mining projects that are closed and in addition of course we will have to improve the capacity of those who are in the environmental sector it doesn't matter whether the environmentalist is working in the government or in the public sector or in the NGO or in the monitoring agency the capacity has to be improved and I'm sure that A and U can bring a great deal of contribution in improving the capacity of those who are working in the field of the environment I didn't take too long