Environmental issues in Kazakhstan

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

nuclear testing sites, the shrinking of the Aral sea, and desertification of former agricultural land. These issues are due in large part to Kazakhstan's years under the Soviet Union
.

Partly because of the country's enormous semi-arid

Semipalatinsk nuclear testing facility (in fact a large zone south of Kourchatov (Курчатов
)) and along the Chinese border.

The Central Asian Regional Environmental Center is located in Kazakhstan,[1] which fosters regional cooperation on environmental issues.

Most of

Ministry of Environmental Protection
is underfunded and given low priority. Some new environmental regulation of the oil industry began in 2003, but new oil operations on Kazakhstan’s Caspian coast add to that sea’s already grave pollution. International programs to save the Aral and Caspian seas have not received meaningful cooperation from Kazakhstan or other member nations.

Kazakhstan had a 2018 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 8.23/10, ranking it 26th globally out of 172 countries.[2]

Aral Sea

The Aral Sea covers 68,000 square kilometres (26,300 sq mi) with Kazakhstan to the north and Uzbekistan to the south.[3]

Soviet irrigation projects begun in the 1960s and other environmental challenges have severely depleted this once massive inland sea and by 2007, it had shrunk to 10 percent of its original size.[3]

Efforts to revive the Aral Sea

The efforts included Syr Darya Control & Northern Aral Sea (NAS) project.[4] The $86 million NAS project, funded jointly by the World Bank through a loan of $65 million and the Government of Kazakhstan which covered the rest, was designed to mitigate the environmental and economic damage to the region, sustain and increase agriculture and fishing in the Syr Darya basin and secure the continued existence of the Northern Aral Sea (also known as the Small Sea) by improving environmental and ecological conditions in the delta area.[4]

In addition, three revival programs were designed for implementation in the Aral Sea Basin (ASBP 1, ASBP 2 and ASBP 3).[4] The most detailed and comprehensive of these, ASBP 3, covers the 2011-2015 period and was developed during Kazakhstan’s presidency of the executive committee of IFAS.[4]

References

  1. ^ "THE REGIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL CENTRE FOR CENTRAL ASIA".
  2. PMID 33293507
    .
  3. ^ a b "Revival of the Aral Sea: Kazakh and World Efforts to Restore the Island Sea". www.edgekz.com/. 20 November 2014.
  4. ^ a b c d "Revival of the Aral Sea: Kazakh and World Efforts to Restore the Island Sea". edgekz.com. 20 November 2014.

Public Domain This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain. Country Studies. Federal Research Division.

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