At the end of a bright autumn day in the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar, it is -12 degrees. As the evening falls, thousands of chimneys in the city begin to release thick and hot smoke, changing the colour of the sky to a dusty pink. Thousands of households have to burn low-quality coal until the morning to cope with the temperatures, which drops to -15 degrees at night at this time of year – it gets a lot colder!

Even with an air pollution mask, the combination of the cold and smoke is difficult to bear. The toxic fumes dance in the air with the wind and create a grey hue around the street lamps.

Ulaanbaatar is the world’s coldest capital, experiencing temperatures as low as -40 degrees in the winter months. Half of Mongolia’s three million people live in the capital, as the migration from rural to urban areas has soared since the 1990s.

Although the Mongolian economy grew at a fast pace afterwards and this landlocked nation emerged as a vibrant democracy, a third of country’s population still live below the poverty line. Almost 40 percent of Mongolia’s population is dependent on animal husbandry and rain-fed agriculture for its livelihood.

Every year thousands of nomadic herders lose their animals to a natural disaster unique to Mongolia known as dzud. In 2016 more than one million animals were killed by dzud, forcing the herders to seek new opportunities in the capital.

The combination of climate change, peaking population, limited infrastructure and heavy dependence on coal for up to eight months of the year have created the one of the worst cases of air pollution in the world.