Mongolia disaster management reference handbook (2025)

This handbook provides background on the hazards, disaster management structure and key actors, national coping capacities, operational environment, and other considerations to support planners, practitioners, and responders in understanding Mongolia's disaster management environment. It aims to support effective preparation or disaster response in Mongolia, or to facilitate working alongside Mongolia disaster responders in exercises or other events.

Among the country’s unique hazard characteristics is dzud, which combines the effects of abnormal – too little, too much, too early, or too late - precipitation and extreme freezes. The immediate threat posed by these hazards to lives and livelihoods is matched by the longer-term threat posed to the cultural and socio-political well-being of Mongolia’s people. Dispossession of herders and rural-to-urban migration are sapping the vitality of traditions that have sustained the people and formed the underpinnings of the post-Soviet state’s stability.