Desertification, driven by climate change, is destroying the Nogai people’s grasslands and livelihoods.

TEREKLI-MEKTEB, Dagestan - In the remote north of Russia’s Caucasian Dagestan region, rich grasslands once sustained hordes of humans and animals alike. Now, herds of stray cows roam towering sand dunes in a huge new desert that grows bigger every year.

For 30 years now, climate change has been driving the sands further into the Nogai steppe, gradually transforming the traditional homeland of a people that once dominated much of southern Russia from green and pleasant pasture to barren desert.

“Welcome to our little Sahara,” said Rashid Bakiyev, the 61-year-old deputy head of the local forestry commission.
Until recently rich and fertile, the steppes northwest of the Caspian Sea have always attracted eager settlers.

The Nogai — a Turkic-speaking nation descended from the Mongol Golden Horde — are only the latest people to claim this slice of steppe as their own, with their ancestors having settled in the region after leaving Central Asia over a thousand years ago.

Nomads until the 1930s, the Nogai gained a reputation as fierce warriors, ruling the lands between the Caspian and Black seas and fighting Russian expansion southwards.

Today, 100,000 remaining Nogai are dispersed across Russia’s southern steppe, their culture mostly forgotten. Only in Dagestan’s distant northern reaches does their language survive and thrive.

More recently, however, nature has turned on the Nogai in their steppe strongholds.

Sometime in the early 1990s — no one can remember exactly when — the soil beneath the lush grasslands around Terekli-Mekteb, a dusty steppe town of around 6,000 that is the capital of Dagestan’s Nogai district, began to crumble into sand.

By the end of the decade, massive dunes had begun to erupt from beneath the plains. Throughout the 2010s, the salty lakes that had kept the soil watered dried up, leaving behind white-bottomed salt flats that still litter the steppe.

Today, the steppe’s transformation continues apace, as the sands spread further into the grassland, aided by the powerful winds that sweep in from the Caspian Sea.

Though reliable figures for desertification are hard to come by, at least 2000 square kilometers — equivalent to around a quarter of the Nogai district’s entire landmass — are now desert, according to a 2020 report by the Russian government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

“One small patch of desert appears suddenly, and it expands very quickly,” said Bakiyev, who in his role at the forestry commission is at the forefront of the Nogais’ fight against desertification.

“You need to stop it as soon as possible.”

Over the last few decades, the Nogai have learnt how to fight the desert. Planting trees can keep the soil watered, preventing the encroaching sand from taking root.

When it does, they plant zhuzgun, a wiry, deep-rooted weed native to Kazakhstan that binds the earth together, preventing the sand dunes from expanding further.

But with every passing year the struggle becomes more one-sided, with the Nogai overpowered by the sheer scale of the transformation taking place.
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“The situation is catastrophic,” said Bakiyev. “It’s a disaster for our people.”
“Desertification is not inevitable,” said the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Andreeva.

“You need a serious regime to regulate pasture use, and a big program of tree planting to hold back the desert’s spread.”

But out on the steppe — where the supply of fertile land grows smaller each year and the rains show no signs of returning — many Nogai see nothing less than an existential threat to their nation and way of life.

With each passing year more young Nogais, their traditional agricultural livelihoods destroyed by the desert, abandon a depopulating Terekli-Mekteb to seek work in Moscow or distant Siberian oil towns.

“We don’t have factories or anything like that,” said Bakiyev. “People here live on the land.”

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