Kyrgyzstan and FAO partner for green development in forests and pastures

As the last step to start activities, FAO and Kyrgyzstan officially signed an agreement on a joint project helping carbon sequestration through climate investment in forests and pastures in the Kyrgyz Republic, with financial support by the Green Climate Fund (GCF) worth USD 30 million.

The project will contribute to income diversification of rural communities by considering climate-oriented approaches in agriculture and forestry.

“This project is truly aimed at improving the lives of people in Kyrgyzstan and providing timely assistance for them,” said Viorel Gutu, FAO Subregional Coordinator for Central Asia and FAO Representative ad interim in Kyrgyzstan, thanking the Ministry of Agriculture and all partners for the fruitful cooperation and the results that have been achieved so far.

Activities will mainly target carbon sequestration – the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – through three methods; climate investments in forests and rangelands, which will also address the drivers of degradation and emissions, developing a participatory ecosystem-based sustainable management of natural resources, as well as encouraging climate-sensitive value chains investments.

“Taking into account the growing political attention to forests and the adoption of the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forest and Land Use at the 2021 COP26 Summit, and the initiative of S. N. Zhaparov, President of the Kyrgyz Republic, on the conservation and development of mountain forest ecosystems, I hope that this project will make a considerable contribution to implementing Kyrgyzstan’s National Development Programme until 2026," commented Dzhanybekov Askarbek, Minister of Agriculture on the occasion of the signature.

Kyrgyzstan is among the countries that endorsed the COP26 declaration and the project marks concrete steps in bringing its commitments into action.

Forests have a major role in combating climate change as they have the potential for the first half of this century to absorb about 10 percent of global carbon emissions projected into their biomass and the soil and store that carbon. At the same time, unsustainable agricultural and forestry practices and climate change are the key reasons for land degradation and soil erosion. In Kyrgyzstan, 40 percent of agricultural land is seriously degraded and over 85 percent of the total land area is eroded.

When managed sustainably, forests can also increase the resilience of communities by providing fundamental economic, social, and environmental services.

In the light of that, the GCF-funded project, the biggest in Europe and Central Asia realized through FAO, will strengthen green investments to rehabilitate forests and rangelands, and climate-sensitive value chain development. Additionally, it will reduce rural communities’ dependency on pastures and woody resources and improve livelihoods by channeling investments into income diversification, enhanced efficiency, and competitiveness for rural women and men.

14 March 2022, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan