It is impossible to have a healthy lifestyle as long as you live in Ulaanbaatar. 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’s edges. 

Ulaanbaatar – home to half of Mongolia’s three million population – is one of the most polluted capitals in the world.  Every person living in the capital is breathing the same amount of polluted air as smoking 5-6 packs of cigarettes a day. Therefore, heart disease, pneumonia, and tuberculosis – these are just some of the diseases aggravated by the already hazardous level of air quality in Ulaanbaatar. 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 the World Health Organization’s suggested maximum.

According to a 2019 study for the United Nations Development Programme, the welfare costs of air pollution are estimated at USD 486 million annually, the costs of lost productivity at USD 58 million, with a combined cost equal to 5.6 percent of Mongolia’s gross domestic product. To address this issue, the government adopted the National Program for Reducing Air and Environmental Pollution in March 2017, with the ultimate target of 80 percent air pollution reduction by 2025.

On May 15, 2019, the Government of Mongolia implemented a ban on raw coal – a type of fuel that poor citizens in the city use to survive harsh winters in the world’s coldest capital – and introduced “refined coal briquettes” at a subsidized price close to the price of raw coal. However, coal briquettes are failed to solve the problem of Mongolia’s air pollution. On the contrary, citizens are concerned about the quality of coal briquettes.