In Asian deserts environmental and anthropomorphic dust is a significant health risk to populations [
1]. Natural particulate sources in dry landscapes are exacerbated by human activities that increase the vulnerability to dust and dust-borne disease vectors. Today in Central and Inner Asian steppe drylands, agriculture, mining, and rapid development contribute to increased dust generation and community exposure. Perhaps most infamous is the desiccation of the Aral Sea into a major dust source, which the UN called one of the world’s ‘worst environmental disasters’ [
2]. This highlights that ‘Asia sources, including the Taklimakan, Gobi, and the Chinese loess plateau represent ~25% of global dust emissions’ ([
3], p. 1). Whilst dust impact on regional health has been identified but not studied extensively [
4,
5,
6], knowledge of potential desert dust interaction with human health is well established [
7]. This paper examines the current dust-health dynamics across greater Central Asia, and then investigates a case study in the Mongolian Gobi to examine if mega-mining dust generation may present a particulate concentration sufficient to affect human health.
Dryland dust storms and particulate matter are significant globally because they affect the physical and human environment, both in situ and in downwind locations [
1]. Arid zones are identified as major dust sources with Asian hotspots, such as the Aral Sea, Taklamakan, and Gobi Deserts documented as home to significant dust events [
4,
8,
9]. The importance of Central and Inner Asia as a source is reflected in regional dust affecting Japan, Korea, and Taiwan [
10] with recent investigation showing that 3% of Asian dust now reaches the western United States (US) [
3]. Climate variability, land cover change—especially mining, agriculture and development—and natural source exposure contributes to the Asian drylands’ role as a significant dust source.
The greater Central Asian region represents inland, continental, high latitude cold deserts (
Figure 1a) that comprise a part of the vast Asian paleo-arctic arid expanse. Known under several loosely defined terms, Mohammat et al. [
11] identify Inner Asia as stretching from Mongolia to the Himalayas and the Caspian Sea (35–55° N, 45–120° E). Lioubimtseva and Henebry [
12] delineate the political construct of Central Asia as based on Soviet-era borders—today’s Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Various definitions include parts of Afghanistan, Tibet, and even Iran or southern Russia (
Figure 1b) in a more geographic demarcation. In Russian, the term Middle Asia remains standard [
13], whilst Central Eurasia, High Asia, Asian Interior, and historically Turkestan have named the region [
14]. This paper defines Central Asia and Inner Asia to include the areas covered above and presented in
Figure 1. The vast region, covering >5 million km
2 and being home to ~100 million people, encompasses several deserts and vast steppe drylands that serve as extensive global dust emission sources [
8]. This paper presents the regional dust context through assessment of recent dust research in the area; it then examines how dust impacts human health and notes implications of mining-generated particulates. A case study is then presented in the Mongolia Gobi Desert (43.20° N, 107.19° E), where an in-situ investigation was conducted through placement of dust traps to assess the potential nexus between mining-dust-health in the rural Central Asian environment. Work investigates dust in the vicinity of an international mega-mine in Mongolia, targeted by a community complaint to international lenders [
15] and the potential community health exposure to dust, a risk that repeats throughout Central Asia.
1.1. Regional Context: Description of Dust Sources
Dust storms are meteorological events that are observed globally, often in arid and semi-arid climates and are common in the dust belt that stretches from the Sahara in West Africa to the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts in East Asia [
17]. In Central Asia, the main dust sources includes (i) the Taklamakan desert [
18] of the Tarim Basin [
19] in the Northwest of China; (ii) the Badan Jarain desert [
20], which spans the provinces of Gansu, Ningxia, and Inner Mongolia of China; (iii) the Gobi desert with its Altai Mountains, Lake Ulaan-Nuur, Zamiin-Uud of Mongolia; (iv) areas along the Hexi corridor in China; (v) the Karakum of Turkmenistan; (vi) Kyzylkum of Uzbekistan; and, (vii) the Arakum and the Balkhash-Alakol depression of Kazakhstan [
21].
Dust emissions occur where strong wind that exceeds a threshold value, surface material is susceptible to wind erosion and transport, there is limited vegetation cover and instable atmospheric conditions [
21]. Estimations of dust emissions strength [
22,
23] in different parts of the world demonstrated that after the Sahara’s importance, Central Asia accounts for 20% of the global total [
1]. Kes et al. [
19] reported that the Tarim Basin in North-West of China, with 100–174 dust storms per year, has more dust events than anywhere on Earth. In general, most regional dust storms last between 2 to 21 h [
24], however fine PM
10 and PM
2.5 remain in the air [
1]. These factors are a product of wind speed, visibility, event duration, climate modification, and a new meteorological phenomenon-radiation budget. This region, far from any oceans, has about 100–400 mm of precipitation and up to 900–1500 mm of evaporation per year [
25]. Consequently, the region is characterised by vast desert areas, frequent soil, and atmospheric droughts [
21] and strong near surface winds. This Central Asian Arid Zone (CAAZ) is a powerful source of airborne dust that has a major impact on various earth ecosystems [
26].
Asian dust constitutes an important component of mineral aerosol affecting the global water cycle and energy budget [
27]. The weathering and dissolution of Asian dust absorb CO
2, as well as other vital nutrients that are transported to remote terrestrial and marine ecosystems, making it a part of global elemental cycling [
28] and affecting the paleo-environmental data [
29,
30,
31]. Zheng et al. [
32] state that Asian dust includes almost all mineral types that are part of the upper continental crust and that, due to wind sorting; it is also mainly composed of light minerals and clays mineral. Soils normally have specific clay mineral composition that is equilibrated with the local climate condition; for example, Biscaye et al. [
33] first used the kaolinite/chlorite ratio of clay minerals to detect the provenance of dust. Then Shen et al. [
34] extended this method to illite/kaolinite ratio as well to investigate the source of the suspended particles in North China. Unfortunately, this method was not very successful for the Asian dust to detect difference of clay mineral composition between the possible source areas for the provenance. When coupled with heavy metals composition, magnetic susceptibility, X-ray diffraction was tried but was not a reliable source tracer for Asian dust. Some positive detection methods were obtained with carbonate contents analysis, especially dolomite [
28], and with silicate Nd-Sr isotopic composition [
35,
36,
37]. These methods effectively analyse the geo-chemistry of dust in Asia.
Past studies have indicated that many dust emissions are consistently from active hot spots. Three main factors are the contributors of the dust activity. The first factor is natural climatic variability. For example, links have been established between dust emissions from the Tarim basin and the Artic Oscillation (AO) Index, with dust activity being high during the negative phase of the AO [
18]. Anthropogenic modifications of the desert surface [
38] and global warming climate changes are the two other contributing factors of the dust activities [
1]. Central Asia is probably the most disturbed desert surface with grazing and crop production, desiccation of lakes and soil surfaces by inter-basin water transfers, vehicular traffic, ground water depletion, and the removal of vegetation cover [
21].
Some source areas are very active dust generators; in Central Asia, the Tarim Basin/Taklamakan [
18,
19], the Badan Jarain [
39], and the Gobi of Mongolia [
40] are important sources of dust storms (
Table 1). Dust exposition can also come from anthropogenic sources, such as industrial, agricultural, and mining exploitations that generate higher concentration levels of a given substance in the air [
1]. The Central Asian landscape has been altered, in part being degraded by extensive farming programmes and mining extraction [
4]. The dust impact on human health can occur at great distance from the source, dependent on particulate transport [
41].
Dust storms in Central Asia have been studied and recorded since 1936, mainly before 1980 [
42]. Being a major source of global dust aerosol, Central Asia has been a generator of frequent and severe dust storms [
13]. Analysis of meteorological data establishes changes in dust events and frequency. Declining trends were observed during the latter part of the 20th century (1970–2000) in Turkmenistan [
43] and Central Asia [
21], as well as in parts of Mongolia and China [
44,
45] during the five last decades of the 20th century. In contrast, others found an increasing trend reflecting changes in precipitation and soil moisture, rather than wind conditions [
46]. Goudie [
1] identified that natural and anthropogenic factors are implicated in the observed trends [
47]. The early years of the present millennium saw several severe dust events in this region [
48,
49]; the prevalent explanation is that natural climatic factors are surpassing the human pressures on the land [
50].
During the Soviet era, Central Asia experienced severe land degradation with excessive livestock exploitation and radical transformation of agricultural practices [
13]. In Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan land degradation followed Khrushchev’s infamous, environmentally damaging, ‘Virgin lands’ farming expansion diktat [
51]. Their natural desert pastures have been transformed into vast agricultural exploitations [
4,
52]. Against the warning of scientists, Soviet management turned out to be extremely inefficient despite vast irrigation expansion programmes. Due to its overexploitation as water resource for agriculture, the Aral Sea basin lost more than 70% of its volume in five decades and the region has been proclaimed an ecological disaster zone [
4,
53]. Water demand from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, as well as the Kara Kum Canal of Turkmenistan kept increasing, which resulted in Aral Sea water table collapse [
26]. As a consequence of the drop in the Aral Sea level, new dry areas became active hotspots of dust storms [
4]. The bottom of the sea salts, and then fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides, and other conditions that affect health and hygiene (especially water and sewage), supplied the dust storms with particles that are chemically detrimental to human health. The Aral Sea loss [
54] is a striking example of how disturbance of the natural landscape contributes to dust and health impacts. Intensive water diversion upriver for farming has exposed the seafloor and salty flats that are now the source of severe dust storms with very high amount of PM
10 particulate (
Figure 2) [
5].
Indoitu et al. [
21] investigated dust storms in Middle Asia (their term), describing seven decades of dust storm phenomenon that cover the pre- and post-Soviet period (see also [
13,
42]). Research concludes that (i) generally the northern region has less frequent and shorter dust storm events; (ii) the southern region has higher frequency and longer dust storms; (iii) the spatial distribution analysis of dust storms revealed sources that have undergone changes during the time of analysis; (iv) the northern Caspian desert dust storm emission areas reduced significantly in size and shifted to the east; (v) in the Kara-kum and Kyzyl-kum deserts and the Balkhash Lake area dust storm emission areas reduced in size; and, (vi) the new Aral-kum human-induced desert, which was once a seafloor became very active [
21]. The severe dust storms classified as hazardous and highly hazardous coincided with those with a duration that exceeded 20 days and were located in the north-western part of the Ili valley and the Kara-kum and Kyzyl-kum deserts (
Figure 3).
Study of northern China and Mongolia from MODIS satellite images [
56] enabled the identification of dust emissions hot spots. Dust sources in south-eastern Mongolia have migrated northward since 2006; dry lakes, riverbeds, mines, and croplands contribute as hot spots in China and Mongolia. Industrial activities in Otintag Sandy and agricultural activities in Horquin sandy land are identified hot spots on MODIS [
56]. Natsagdorj, L. et al. [
40] used climatology data from 1937 to 1999 to analyse dust storm events in Mongolia, thereby confirming the Gobi as a major source of dust storms. The highest frequency of dust storms is observed in the southern Altai Mountains, around Lake Ulaan-Nuur and Zamiin-Uud on the border. Findings coincide quite well with the strong wind events frequency [
57]. First, dusty days have increased from the 1960s to the 1990s, and then started to decrease from 1990, confirming [
44] findings. Results showed that 61% of the dust storms occur in the spring, which concurs with the well-known Spring Asian Dust Storms (SADS) in Japan [
58].
1.2. General Assessment of Dust-Health Interaction with a Focus on Mongolia
Asian dust, produced by the land surface dominated by gravel deserts, sandy deserts, sandy land, and dry grassland is ideal for dust emission [
59]. The released dust transports eastward and south-eastward with the atmospheric circulations is known as spring dust storms in Central and East Asia. Dust matter is absorbed during transport influences the atmospheric quality of the populated regions [
28]. Natural aeolian dust and sand can be beneficial; agricultural loess deposits are aeolian sediments that are formed by the accumulation of wind-blown dust, are common on the northern China plateau [
60]. This is exacerbated when dust emission intensity and impacts are amplified by anthropogenic interventions that it becomes a source of air pollution [
61,
62]. Its constituent parts are airborne particulate matter (PM) from any direct emissions, which could have been modified with secondary products emitted from anthropogenic activities or biogenic origins.
Level and exposition rate: In the Inner Asia region, home to 20% of global dust, health risk varies with the exposure, frequency, and intensity of dust storms [
1]. Analysis of meteorological data establishes changes in dust events and frequency. Declining trends were observed during the latter part of the 20th century (1970–2000) in Turkmenistan [
43] and Central Asia [
21]. In general, most regional dust storms last between 2 to 21 h [
24], however fine PM
10 and PM
2.5 remain in the air [
1]. These factors are a product of wind speed, visibility, event duration, climate modification, and new meteorological phenomenon-radiation budget.
Studies emphasise the possible harmful effects of high concentrations of airborne PM on human health with a focus on how particulate affects cardiovascular and respiratory functions [
63]. Scientific evidence identifies the potential effects of PM
10 and PM
2.5 on our body systems; pathogenic effects at different levels can appear at different time scales with a range of plausible disorder symptoms. Epidemiological studies indicate the possible health impacts of dust exposure, yet direct causality is difficult to document. For example, Kenessariey et al. [
64] examined the human health cost of air pollution in Kazakhstan and the direct effect of high levels of PM
10 and PM
2.5 in the air on the mortality rate. Added to the high concentrations in small PM, the ambient air in large urban, industrial, and agricultural areas of Central Asia is polluted by chemical emissions. The systemic review in Mongolia done by Jadambaa et al. [
65] shows the extent of the environmental pollutants and risk factors in rural and urban areas in Mongolia. Results demonstrated that Mongolian children have greater exposure to environmental factors with polluted air that includes heavy metals and tobacco smoke.
The human body is capable of auto-cleaning and auto-healing through specialised cells whose functions are to sweep or phagocytised away dust out of our body and organs that eliminate pathogenic agents [
66,
67]. Unfortunately, in several areas of Inner Asia environmental risks factors now exceed the human capacity to mitigate damage [
68]. The severity of dust health impacts depends on individual tolerance levels, which is linked to genetic background, age, and circumstances affecting the ability to cope with the aggressive agents and levels of exposure to environmental risk factors.
Several determinants affect the aeolian dust effect on human health. Assessing the frequency and severity of the pathogenic effects encourages a better understanding of the possible different detrimental impacts of dust on the human body [
1]. Particle size is a main determinant; unlike coarse PM that are filtered by the ciliated and mucus cells, PM < 10 microns in diameter are absorbed by the lung tissues and can embed in the bronchioles and alveoli structures [
69]. This affects respiratory functions as fine grains (<2.5 microns) can enter the blood stream and are transported to other organs to act as disrupters [
70,
71]. Khaniabadi, Y.O. et al. [
72] demonstrated that dust events and PM
10 have a direct impact on hospital admissions for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and on the Respiratory Mortality (RM).
The chemical composition of particulate—mineralogical, isotopic, and elemental—is an important factor. For example, Long-term exposure to silica dust is associated with an increase of mortality among the mineworkers due to respiratory diseases, silicosis, lung cancer, and cardiovascular diseases [
73]. Generally speaking, dust storms are composed primarily of Silica SiO
2, Al
2O
3, and in lesser amounts, Fe
2O
3, CaO and MgO. Other components in dust can be salts, organic, pathogenic, and polluting materials. Various studies examined the environmental risk factors due to SO
2, NO
2, Pb, and other heavy metals like Zn, Ni, Co, and Cr in the air near mining areas [
74]. Geochemical analysis on Asian dusts indicated a clear contrast between the potential sources areas coming from the tectonic structure of the arid lands and gave some evidence of the natural or anthropogenic type of sources.
Anthropogenic sources, particularly mining, agriculture, industry, livestock grazing, and urban development are changing the dust composition and contaminants [
4,
75]. Among the transported anthropogenic pollutants, aerosols like pesticides, herbicides, and dioxins are well known for their effects on human health. For example, Kanatani, K.T. et al and Watanabe, M. et al. [
76,
77] found that the transport of pollen brought by the Asian dust Storms (ADS) increases asthma in the population and causes an increased morbidity in Japan [
78]. Biological materials like bacteria, viruses, fungi, and pollen are also picked up and transported on long distances. Here, again human activities can modify the ecosystems, which will have a similar effect on dust composition.
Mining processes are a significant source of dust with exploration, development, extraction, and transport reconfiguring landscapes and contributing to emissions [
79,
80]. Nations across greater Central Asia host large-scale mines, excavating copper, gold, coal, uranium, silver, amongst several elements. The economic value, jobs and importance for state revenue leads to mining expansion despite possible detrimental environmental impacts. In Kyrgyzstan, gold and in Mongolia copper are the countries’ main exports, whilst China’s Gobi region is its largest coal producer and domestic energy source. Yet, mining generates copious dust, including finer particles that have respiratory health implications [
79]. Open pit mines, rock crushing, waste heaps, and land cover change become dust sources. Ma et al. [
74] illustrate how mining sites contaminate soil and dust, and contribute to air pollution after dust events [
81] identify the high impact of mining on the environment and community and threatens herding livelihoods. In fact, ice cores in the Tien Shen Mountains identify recent dust deposition from Central Asian mining and anthropogenic causes [
82]. As mining expands, the impact on dust generation will increase across the region.
There are predictive methods to assess the effects of dust pollution on human health based on observations and monitoring of the dust air composition and concentrations in different target pollutants, and using World Health Organisation (WHO) air qualities guidelines [
83,
84]. WHO estimations are based on available concentration data and evidences of the mortality effects of air particulate pollution [
85]. The USEPA (United States Enivronmental Protection Agency) risk assessment model calculates of daily intake dose values using factors such as dust exposure frequency, duration, contact time, ingestion rate, inhalation rate, dermal adsorption factor, and the particle emission rate. Health risk models are used that are based on the carcinogenic or non-carcinogenic nature of the polluting substances being analysed [
86]. Ghorbel, M. et al. [
87] undertook health hazard assessment and calculation of airborne metals concentrations from the PM
10 based on inhalable particle size. Ma et al. [
74] and Li et al. [
88] used the geo-accumulation index; Argyraki, A [
89] and others introduced the notion of bioavailability and bioaccessibility to quantify the risks that are associated with exposure to environmental pollutants [
90]; evaluations are based on in vivo animal experiments. Hospital admissions fore dust complications are a further method [
76]. Studies in China link dust events to respiratory problems, such asthma, pneumonia, and tracheitis [
67].