Forest around Astana to be enlarged up to 100,000 ha

ASTANA. KAZINFORM - It is planned that the forest around Astana will have been increased up to 100,000 hectares by 2021 as was announced during the Conference on the Forest Landscape Restoration and the Bonn Challenge, Kazinform cites the Agriculture Ministry's press service.

"From 1997 to 2018, we have created plantations over an area of more than 80,000 ha around the capital of Kazakhstan. This is a demonstrative example of the work the country is doing to create and restore forest landscapes. By 2021, we plan to enlarge the green zone around Astana up to 100,000 ha," the statement said following the meeting in Astana.

It has been pointed out that Kazakhstan achieves good results in the restoration of the forest ecosystem not only among the countries of the region but all over the world.

Over the past decade, the forest regeneration has reached the area of 500,000 ha, which allowed increasing the country's forest land percentage to 4.7% (0.2% growth).

The meeting is the first opportunity to bring the national and regional efforts in the Caucasus region and Central Asia into line with the Bonn Challenge, a global effort to restore 350 million ha of degraded and deforested land by 2030.

Opening the meeting, Kazakhstan's Deputy Prime Minister and Agriculture Minister Umirzak Shukeyev emphasized that "many countries have already made significant progress in the restoration of land." "However, taking into account the restoration challenge scale, it is vital to mobilize internal and external resources so that to increase the forest cover and improve the living standards in that way," he stressed.

Heads of forest authorities of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Germany, Georgia, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and representatives of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) took part in the roundtable.