|
|
|
John Farrington
Kyrgyz Republic
February 2004
Biodiversity in the Tian Shan
Anyone who has spent time in provincial Russia will feel right at home in Kyrgyzstan's capital, Bishkek, with its Soviet era apartment blocks, creaky trolley buses, Lenin monuments and back streets lined with cottonwoods and Russian farmhouses. Also, although ethnic Kyrgyz make up the majority of the population, most people in Bishkek still speak Russian to each other. While the governments of other former Soviet Republics are actively trying to eliminate the Russian language from daily life, many ethnic Kyrgyz in Bishkek readily admit that they can't speak Kyrgyz, though most claim to understand it. For me, however, Bishkek's single most striking feature is not the city's Russian ways, but the glacier-studded Kyrgyz Range south of the city, rising to an elevation of 15,900 feet and forming a wall of rock, snow, and ice that looms over the capital.
My research concerns post-Soviet changes in land use and potential for biodiversity conservation in the central Tian Shan mountains. During the Soviet era, the economy of rural Kyrgyzstan was based on large livestock herding collectives, which annually moved millions of head of livestock between lowland winter pastures, located near permanent settlements, and summer pastures in remote high mountain valleys. With the breakup of the collectives, herds were privatized and divided up among individual families. Mass migration to distant highland summer pastures largely ceased, having become uneconomical for small family livestock operations, leading to severe pasture degradation around permanent settlements while millions of hectares of highland pastures are no longer used. Furthermore, the total number of sheep in Kyrgyzstan has plummeted from roughly 10 million in 1990 to three million in 2000, as privately owned livestock were quickly sold or bartered for subsistence goods during the period of acute economic hardship which ensued after the Soviet collapse.
While these developments have had unintended benefits for biodiversity of highland areas in the Tian Shan, biodiversity and the environment have recently come under threat from activities far more destructive than grazing. Due to the end of Soviet-era subsidized coal and gas imports, village dwellers have taken to cutting the extremely limited forest cover in the Tian Shan to heat their homes and cook their meals. At the same time, with the end of Soviet funding for nature reserve management, professional poaching rings have flourished, illegally selling wildlife products on the thriving Asian black market. In one high-profile example, the population of snow leopards in Kyrgyzstan has decreased from about 1,400 in 1985 to 150 today. The opening of independent Kyrgyzstan to mineral exploration and mining has added yet another potentially large threat to biodiversity conservation efforts. While Kyrgyzstan has retained its Soviet-era system of nature reserves, none of the existing reserves are large enough to adequately protect the threatened species and ecosystems contained within their boundaries.
Thus the goals of my project are twofold: first, to establish how patterns of highland pasture use have changed in the central Tian Shan since independence, and second, in light of these changes and new ecological threats, to examine what actions can be taken to improve and expand biodiversity conservation efforts in the central Tian Shan. In carrying out my investigation, I have relied heavily on Kyrgyzstan's relatively small, close-knit community of environmental workers in both the capital and provincial areas, including university ecology departments, international development organizations, local environmental NGOs and government officials, all of whom have given me encouragement and freely shared contacts and information.
Kyrgyzstan is a nation dominated by soaring mountains and friendly herders which has exceptionally high biodiversity, and the potential to become a trekking, mountaineering and eco-tourism mecca comparable to Nepal. Surprisingly, there is not a single major international conservation NGO with an office in Kyrgyzstan. While there is an urgent need for implementation of biodiversity conservation projects in Kyrgyzstan, this need has gone largely unmet due to severe lack of local and international funding. Ultimately, however, it is the continuing financial hardship resulting from economic restructuring that constitutes the single largest threat to biodiversity in the Tian Shan, forcing citizens to exploit the range's fragile ecological resources at unsustainable levels in order to survive. Without dramatic improvements in the regional economy and trade relations, Kyrgyzstan's economic isolation will continue, as will threats to the unique natural heritage of the Tian Shan.
|
|
