technical expertise

In the scope of STeP EcoLab Mongolia project funded by the European Union, a handbook of environmentally friendly, sustainable production for Mongolian Wool and Cashmere industry is published and ready to be delivered to the hands of managements, engineers and technical workers of the sector.

For more than six generations, Italian company Loro Piana, the world’s most revered wool and cashmere brand, has been sourcing the finest fibers from some of the most inhospitable places on Earth to create its famously exquisite fabrics and garments. After decades of buying its raw cashmere fibers directly from selected herdsmen from Inner and Outer Mongolia, in 2009 it launched a sustainable development program, the Loro Piana Method, with universities in Italy, China and Mongolia. This initiative aims to further improve the impeccable quality that Loro Piana’s devoted customers expect of its cashmere, support smaller herds through selective breeding, preserve the ancient and complex craft of harvesting the precious under-fleece, secure a premium price for the herdsmen’s precious fibers, and protect the local ecosystem.

One of the first actions Kering took was to help improving goat-combing, in order to make the process cleaner and more efficient. Local herders have learned how to sort cashmere by quality, packing the different grades into cotton, rather than plastic bags. Cashmere fiber quality is also now being augmented through improving goat husbandry and breeding. The project also supports veterinary services to improve the health and condition of goats.

The effort relies on vegetation maps created by Stanford's Natural Capital Project, which draws on satellite data, mainly from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, an instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite; NASA also helps interpret the data. Healthy vegetation re

istributed nodes and decentralization can help advance important social outcomes with credible partners.

If the salacious strategy seems cheap, it’s actually not quite—Naadam is sponsoring a goat-breeding program in Mongolia, where it sources its cashmere. The program, working with local farmers and veterinary experts from Ulaanbatar, the country’s capital, is hoping to bring 500 to 1,000 more goats into the world. (Naadam, launched in 2015, bills itself as a socially conscious business with a model based on paying herders more while charging consumers less, by cutting out middle men.) In other words, the brand is just telling its story, as well it should.

A more immediate and perhaps attainable goal is to convince herders to keep fewer goats. They might do so if their animals produced better cashmere, which would fetch higher prices. The project is helping herders breed better goats by providing them with in vitro fertilization and superior sperm; offering free veterinary care; and instilling better management practices, such as regularly combing the animals

The nomadic community is one of immense pride but one with a volatile and unstable income,” said Convergence.tech CEO Chami Akmeemana. “Leveraging blockchain technology within the transformation of the cashmere industry can provide numerous benefits for Mongolian herders, buyers, and sellers alike.”

At the same time, the project is also helping herders to plan where and for how long to graze their different pastures during the year. Satellite images gathered by Stanford University and NASA, who joined the project in 2017, are being used to monitor pasture quality and provide new information on which areas can support pasturing. That phase of the project is still in its early days, but the potential for better-managed grazing is huge

This was a consensual process from both sides, with herders stepping up and willing to have their goods marked in return for training on better practices and the hope of opening markets to paying price premiums for truly sustainable and high-quality cashmere.

A partnership between the Oyu Tolgoi mine, luxury group Kering, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Stanford University Natural Capital Project and NASA, the Sustainable Cashmere Project was established in 2015 to reengineer the supply chain of high quality cashmere and the landscape it comes from

In Afghanistan, close to 300 co-operatives have been set up to help cashmere farmers share best practice and gain better access to the market. Access to veterinary care has also been improved to help herders take better care of their animals.

The team's modeling also projects how a change in management practices could improve the health of the land. Onon Bayasgalan, who leads the project for WCS Mongolia, visits the herders frequently to present research findings at meetings of their collective. What the herders do with the data is up to them, but Bayasgalan and the rest of the team hope it will help them find healthier pastures with more food and avoid destructive overgrazing.  NASA data may not always be necessary, Chaplin-Kramer says. "WCS is trying to teach the herders how to tell by visual observation—on the ground, not via satellite—when it's time to move the herd, that is, before they'

With support from NASA, the Natural Capital Project is enabling real-time verification of impacts of the Sustainable Cashmere Project through a fusion of satellite remotesensing and ecosystem modelling techniques. This unique partnership provides a roadmap for private sector actors to promote more regenerative agricultural production.

A team of experts of their respective fields collaborated and created this handbook based on the results of previous studies run by the STeP EcoLab project and common international best practices.

This article is more authoritative than most others insofar as it is published in Science magazine, although this is a news item (written by a science journalist) rather than a peer-reviewed academic article. Quoted sources are academics (e.g., geographer Troy Sternberg from Oxford, Becky Chaplin-Kramer from Stanford) and experts from the Sustainable Cashmere Project partners (WCS). Here we have #technical-expertise as a promotion of authoritative expert knowledge, providing legitimacy to interventions such as the Sustainable Cashmere Project.

technical expertise Technical expert knowledge (and experts) can provide guidance for sustainable development and production. This includes a reliance on science, technology, and engineering.