The Steppe in Winter: Lessons of Imbalance
February 9, 2026
Winter on the Mongolian steppe is a season of endurance, where survival depends on anticipating storms, navigating extreme temperature drops, and caring for both animals and land. For nomadic herders, every day must be carefully planned to protect their herds, whose lives are intricately intertwined with their own. Nearly one-third of the country still lives a nomadic life, sustaining practices honed over centuries, yet each winter they confront the same fundamental challenge: surviving the unforgiving cold.
In the Mongolian language, dzud refers to a period – most often associated with winter – in which overpowering natural forces render food for both humans and livestock critically scarce, leading to widespread hardship and loss.1 While dzud is often associated with particularly harsh winters, it is not caused by winter conditions alone. Dzuds can also occur following comparatively mild winters when preceded by severe summer droughts that deplete pasture growth and reduce available fodder for the livestock In this sense, dzud emerges from multi-seasonal weather disruptions and longer-term ecological pressures that accumulate well before the first snowfall.
Dzud in northwestern Mongolia, 2024. Snow has covered nearly half of a herder’s ger, the traditional Mongolian felt dwelling.
Photo: Anudar E.
It is commonly described as a natural disaster, a weather anomaly, or, increasingly, an effect of climate change. The recent severe dzud in 2023–24 resulted in the loss of approximately 7.1 million livestock, over 11 percent of the national livestock population.(2) More than four thousand households lost the majority of their animals, forcing many to abandon nomadism for more sedentary, urban life, where a different form of insecurity awaits.
Historically, extreme weather events and strategies for surviving them have occupied a central place in Mongolian cosmology, oral history, and epic tradition. In most narratives, nature is not passive background terrain but an active force, capable of withdrawal, correction, or punishment in response to humans’ mistreatment of animals, land, or social and moral obligations. The Mongolian adaptations of the Epic of Gesar have been passed down orally across generations, and many nomads can recite passages from this celebrated story. The epic recounts the hero’s battles against evil through mythological and supernatural powers, in which storms, winds, earthquakes, and other natural forces signify cosmic imbalance caused by human wrongdoing, often under the leadership of an immoral ruler. Across folklore of the Mongols rivers and mountains are inhabited by sacred and protective deities and serve as spaces for the divine for ritual practice, while animals frequently act as guides and company for humans. These narratives shaped how pastoral nomads engage with the natural world, reflecting a long-standing recognition of nature’s power, unpredictability, moral significance, and the interdependence of all living beings.
Young goats are dressed in protective layers to survive the harsh dzud winter in Mongolia.
Photo: Anudar E.
Viewed in this way, harsh winters or dzuds appear as trials that test moral conduct, social cohesion, and the maintenance of balance among humans, animals, land, and spirits. Survival depends less on control than on cultivating careful, respectful relationships among all co-inhabitants of the steppe. Dzud is then not simply an extreme winter for the nomad but a relational event that emerges from the imbalance between weather, land, animals, infrastructure, and social organization.
Contemporary responses to dzud are framed through ‘preparedness’: herders are urged to breed stronger livestock, sell off weaker animals, stock fodder, or even purchase livestock insurance, managing winter as an individual economic calculation. Failure to endure winter is increasingly interpreted as miscalculation or irresponsibility, and what disappears in this framing is the context that once made survival possible – the moral obligations to animals, the land, and the community. Over the last century, Mongolian pastoralism has been reshaped by changing governance and market pressures. While much traditional ecological knowledge remains known, herders’ ability to implement it is increasingly constrained,(3) and survival is framed less as a communal, relational practice and more as an individual responsibility. Herds are treated as financial assets rather than ethical obligations, and enduring winter becomes a calculation of profit and loss rather than a reflection of care, patience, and collective stewardship.
While dzud is a Mongolian term, the condition it describes is not confined to Mongolia. Across the broader steppe – from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to Siberia – herders confront winters that exceed traditional coping strategies. Livestock losses push some toward cities, and many households are becoming more sedentary as pastures are privatized and mobility is constrained. Where winter grazing is unavailable, herders rely on stored forage and occasional emergency aid. Historically, survival depended on communal grazing (shared seasonal use of pasture), coordinated mobility (strategically moving herds to allow pastures to regenerate), supported by the moral and relational knowledge encoded in stories, rituals, and everyday practices. Practices that once sustained both people and the land are now eroding, leaving herders more exposed to environmental extremes and market pressures.
Preparedness emerged as both a policy objective and a moral language. To be prepared is to be rational, disciplined, and forward-looking. To succumb to dzud is to have miscalculated. Yet this framing obscures the realities herders face. Seasonal conditions are often known well in advance through careful observation of livestock health and pasture quality, rather than through short-term warnings or weather apps, making “failure” far more complex than the discourse allows. Yet this framing obscures how preparedness itself has been rendered increasingly difficult: pasture restrictions, reduced mobility, uneven access to financial credit, and the erosion of informal safety nets all constrain the ability to respond to climatic volatility such as the dzud. These pressures also discourage younger generations from continuing herding, creating a negative feedback loop: fewer knowledgeable herders remain to maintain the ethical, relational, and ecological practices that once enabled collective survival.
Improvised fencing and shelter made from tires protect livestock from snow and wind, with fodder stacked for the harsh dzud winter.
Photo: Anudar E.
In older cosmological understanding, loss was interpreted as a sign that relations within the landscape – conceived as a field of interacting human and non-human agencies – had become misaligned, requiring renewed ethical attention to how one inhabited and moved within the land. (4)
Climate change is often invoked to explain the increasing severity and frequency of dzud, and not without reason. Rising temperatures, erratic snowfall, and instability of seasons have produced conditions such as ice-crusted pastures that are particularly lethal to livestock. Climate change does not simply intensify risk; it destabilizes the very frameworks through which risk is supposed to be managed. Weather forecasting models falter under increasing volatility, and long-standing traditional knowledge loses reliability. The promise that nature can be anticipated, priced, and insured against begins to unravel.
When prediction fails, the idea of nature as an agent rather than a system regains force. Dzud once again appears not merely as misfortune but as a signal that relations have become misaligned. Climate change, in this sense, does not replace myth with science. It exposes the fragility of modern certainty and reopens questions that technocratic governance is seeking to close: how much can be controlled, and at what cost?
Nomadism is repeatedly framed in global discourse as obsolete – too vulnerable, too inefficient, too difficult to insure. Mobility, restraint, and relational attunement to land – a true essence and ethos of nomadism – are treated as remnants and practices to be phased out in favor of sedentary infrastructure, which is positioned as a solution to climatic instability. Yet dzud highlights the limitations of this approach: when movement is restricted, herds can exceed ecological thresholds, social support networks weaken, and winter mortality rises. What appears as climatic failure is inseparable from political and economic decisions that prioritize settlement, accumulation, and legibility over adaptive strategies and relational knowledge.
References
1. Dzud, in Mongolian Language Great Dictionary, accessed February 5, 2026, https://mongoltoli.mn/search.php?opt=1&ug_id=48791&word=ЗУД. The phrase “байгалийн эрхшээл нөлөө” (domination of nature) frames nature as sovereign and humans as subject to forces beyond their control.
2. UNICEF Mongolia, Mongolia Humanitarian Situation Report No. 4 (Dzud), 30 April 2024, https://www.unicef.org/media/156161/file/Mongolia_Humanitarian_Situation_Report_No._4_(Dzud)_30_April_2024.pdf
3. Gantuya Batdelger, Beáta Oborny, Batbuyan Batjav, and Zsolt Molnár, The relevance of traditional knowledge for modern landscape management: comparing past and current herding practices in Mongolia, People and Nature Volume 7, Issue 5): 1056–1072, https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10784
4. Caroline Humphrey, “Chiefly and Shamanist Landscapes in Mongolia,” Mongol–Tuva Studies 10 (1995): 1–31, accessed February 5, 2026, https://www.miasu.socanth.cam.ac.uk/files/humphrey._1995._chiefly_and_shamanist_landscapes.pdf.