INTRODUCTION:
Air pollution in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, is a critical environmental and public health crisis that disproportionately affects residents in low resource high vulnerability districts. Using the Social Ecological Model, this study examines how individuals and communities experience air pollution and how intersecting inequities and policy gaps position it as a wicked problem.

METHODS:
We conducted semi structured interviews with adult residents of Ulaanbaatar, drawing on lived experience across diverse districts. Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed and analysed using a hybrid inductive and deductive thematic approach.1 The Social Ecological Model guided interpretation across individual, interpersonal, community, organizational and policy levels, with ongoing input from Mongolian partners to ensure contextual relevance.2

RESULTS:
Participants described vivid physical symptoms, emotional stress and a sense of inevitability captured in the expression “this will be the cause of our death.” Household level coping was constrained by crowded housing, financial limitations and inadequate access to reliable information. These everyday constraints were tightly linked to broader structural forces, including inequitable urban planning, insufficient healthcare capacity and mistrust in government measures that were perceived as poorly designed or unevenly enforced. Together, these dynamics created feedback loops where interventions produced unintended consequences and reinforced existing inequities.

CONCLUSIONS:
Findings position air pollution in Ulaanbaatar as a wicked problem that emerges from interlocking social, environmental and policy factors rather than individual choices alone. Addressing air pollution in low resource high vulnerability urban settings requires interdisciplinary, community engaged approaches that integrate public health, urban planning and policy reform, and that explicitly centre the lived experience of residents in the design of surveillance and interventions.