The Kyrgyz Republic’s commitment to forest landscape restoration under the Bonn Challenge

Mr. Bakyt Yrsaliyev, Deputy Director of Forest Ecosystems Development Department at the State Agency for Environment Protection and Forestry of Kyrgyzstan, announces the Kyrgyz Republic’s commitment to restore 324,000 ha of degraded land under the Bonn Challenge – a global effort to bring 350 million ha of degraded and deforested land into restoration by 2030.

The announcement was made at the first Ministerial Roundtable on Forest Landscape Restoration and the Bonn Challenge in the Caucasus and Central Asia, held on 21-22 June 2018 in Astana, Kazakhstan. Together, high-level representatives of Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan committed to restore over 2.5 million ha of forest landscape under the Bonn Challenge by 2030. The meeting also adopted the Astana Resolution, further committing the region to go beyond 2.5 million ha, and strengthen partnerships and regional cooperation to this end.

The Ministerial Roundtable was organized jointly by the Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in cooperation with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and with the kind support of Germany.