COP17 Recap: Our Event About How Full Traceability Can Save The Rangeland

This year, Ulaanbaatar hosted COP17 of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. For us, it was an opportunity to bring a conversation into the room that is often left between two very different worlds: rangeland management and retail.

We joined a side panel focused on pasture land and sustainable production, where we talked about something we believe is easy to overlook when discussing sustainability: what happens between the land where a material comes from and the person who eventually buys the finished product.

Mongolia's rangelands are not just a landscape. They are home to herders, livestock and communities that have depended on these pastures for generations. They are also where many of the natural fibres used in Mongolian products begin their journey. That connection is what we wanted to talk about.

From pasture to product

When a customer buys a piece of clothing, they usually see the finished product. They might see the design, the material, the price and the brand behind it. What they don't always see is everything that happened before the product reached them.

A fibre can begin with an animal grazing on Mongolian pasture, pass through herders and processors, and eventually become a finished garment sold thousands of kilometres away. Every step in that chain has an effect on the people, animals and land involved.

We believe retail has a role to play in making that connection clearer. The way a product is priced and sold can influence what happens further down the supply chain. If the only goal is to produce as much fibre as possible for the lowest possible price, there is little incentive to think about the long-term health of the land or the people producing it.

But what if the value of a product was connected to the quality of the fibre rather than simply the amount produced? What if better fibre could mean better returns for herders, rather than encouraging them to increase the number of animals they keep? This is one of the ideas behind what we are building.

Quality over quantity

One of the challenges facing rangelands is the pressure created when livestock numbers increase beyond what the land can sustainably support. The answer isn't simply to tell herders to produce less. Livestock are livelihoods, and the people raising them need to earn a living. Instead, we believe part of the solution can come from changing what the market rewards.

If a brand can have more control over its supply chain and the price of the final product, there is an opportunity to put more value into quality fibre and the people producing it. The idea is simple: if higher-quality fibre is worth more, a herder may be able to earn more from better fibre without needing to produce more of it.

This doesn't solve rangeland degradation by itself, and we don't pretend that one brand can solve a problem as complicated as desertification. But retail can be one part of a much larger system.

Making the supply chain visible

Another part of our discussion was the role of transparency. We are working on a Digital Product Passport system that can give customers more information about where a product comes from and what happened to it along the way. For us, this isn't just about putting more information on a product page. It is about making the journey of a material visible.

A customer should be able to understand where the fibre came from, how it was processed, where the product was made and what kind of impact the purchase is intended to support. This creates a stronger connection between the person buying the product and the people and landscape behind it.

Working with what already exists

We were also able to learn from organisations already working directly with Mongolia's pasture systems.

The Green Gold Pasture Ecosystem Management Programme has already developed systems for tracking and understanding parts of the supply chain through its Digital Product Passport work. Our approach is not about replacing what already exists. It is about looking at what is already being done and asking how it could be developed further to provide the level of information and traceability we want to give customers.

The conversation at COP17 was valuable because it brought different perspectives into the same room. Researchers, organisations, producers, businesses and people working directly with rangelands all see different parts of the same problem. Retail is only one of those parts.

Why this conversation matters to us

Wollken and Nogoon Nutag were built around the idea that a business and its impact should not have to be separated. The brand creates the commercial side of what we are building, while Nogoon Nutag is focused on the wider mission of giving back to the land that provides the materials in the first place. That relationship is important to us.

We don't want sustainability to be something that only appears on a product label. We want it to affect how the product is sourced, how it is made, how it is sold and where the value created by that product goes. COP17 gave us the chance to put that idea in front of people who work on these issues every day. We left the room with more questions than we arrived with, but that is part of the point.

There is no single solution to rangeland degradation, desertification or sustainable production. But there are many parts of the system that can change. We believe retail can be one of them. A piece of clothing might seem far removed from a Mongolian pasture. But somewhere along its journey, the two are connected.

We want to make that connection visible, make it worth more to the people who maintain it, and make sure that some of the value created from the land can find its way back to it.