Khulan Gansukh, aged 26, is a Board Member of the National Environmental Youth Council of Mongolia and was part of the Gen-Forum 2025–2026: Young Leaders for Women, Peace and Security convening in Bangkok, Thailand, on 4–5 May 2026. Photo: UN Women/Ploy Phutpheng
17th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification – which is being hosted by Mongolia from 17–28 August. She’s applying her lived experience, role on the Board of the National Environmental Youth Council of Mongolia, alongside her strengthened leadership skills after participating in UN Women’s Gen-Forum 2025–2026.
“I describe Gen-Forum as a space where young people across the region with very different contexts come across together and share their lived experience, their thoughts, and turn their ideas into actionable, concrete things.
All of us in Gen-Forum are from the grass-roots level and we have experienced the negative impact of power inequality.
I grew up in the East Gobi region, in Khatanbulag soum. It was really hot and dusty.
I left Gobi to pursue higher education in the capital. Now, when I visit my hometown, it is so different. In terms of infrastructure, it got better. But in terms of livelihoods and how the environment is affecting the community, I’m shocked. The small lakes and springs where my friends and I used to hang out have dried up. My best friends and their families could no longer rely on the land to continue their livelihoods as herders, so they moved to another region that does not have droughts so often.
Young people will live with the impacts of climate change. The National Youth Environmental Council of Mongolia works to advocate for the inclusion of youth voices in environmental and climate decision-making.
In my country, the power of youth is increasing, but still, it’s not as meaningful as we want it to be.
The decision-makers think that we need to learn more and experience more to be included at the decision-making level. Yet we are the ones living through these issues. We are the key to this sustainable, inclusive and peaceful future that we all want.
Khulan (third from right) with other Gen-Forum 2025–2026 participants from across Asia and the Pacific pictured in Bangkok on 5 May 2026. Photo: UN Women/Tawan Pongphaet
Drawing on evidence
Peace and security are separated from climate change, especially in Mongolia. But I have witnessed that its negative impacts are causing community conflict. For example, herders are in conflict over rangelands for their livestock. They fight for wells.
We have done research on the intersection of women, peace and security and climate change in a peri-urban area and the Gobi Desert. It was evident that the most marginalized, climate-vulnerable groups do not know the term ‘climate change’. So, we used language they could understand, such as drought, loss of biodiversity and wildfires.
We have seen that women are actually the most resilient group to desertification. When herders or farmers lose their livestock or their crop, or when there is a community conflict, women are the ones who find the solutions, bringing people together and the traditional ways of conserving nature.
When there is a relief response to drought, the Government delivers aid, but it’s not always what is needed. If herder women participated in that decision-making, for how that aid should be delivered and what to include, it would easily be avoided.
