The FAO Livestock Environmental Assessment and Performance (LEAP) Partnership, in collaboration with the FAO Subregional Office for Central Asia, joined efforts to organize a series of training sessions for livestock and biodiversity experts in Central Asian countries. The overall objective of these sessions is to provide participants with the skills to evaluate the impacts of livestock production systems on biodiversity through the practical application of the FAO LEAP guidelines.

About the guidelines

The livestock sector is a major consumer of natural resources, with a particular emphasis on land use, while simultaneously being asource of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. These factors collectively make livestock one of the sectors with the highest impact on biodiversity. At the same time, livestock production also holds the potential to drive improvements in biodiversity performance.

While only few environmental assessments have addressed biodiversity in the livestock sector., the FAO LEAP guidelines strive to include biodiversity in environmental assessments to increase the understanding of the impacts of livestock on biodiversity, revealing possible synergies or trade-offs with other environmental criteria and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Several indicators in these guidelines are also relevant to the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

Kazakhstan, livestock, and biodiversity

With about 45 percent of the country's population living in rural areas and around 75 percent of the total agricultural area used for grazing activities, livestock farming is a key resource for the economy of Kazakhstan. Concurrently with the growth of the livestock sector, experts have become increasingly aware of the importance of preserving biodiversity to the greatest extent possible.

The training was led by Majid Iravani, FAO LEAP Technical Training Support Specialist, who emphasized the importance of biodiversity as a key aspect of livestock production. Yuriy Nesterov, International Livestock Specialist at the FAO Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia and Xiangyu Song, Manager of the FAO LEAP Partnership, provided technical support during the training.

The training was held at the Kazakh Scientific Research Institute of Animal Husbandry and Forage Production. More than 30 experts  participated in the event, including leaders of national plant and livestock research projects, ecologists, biotechnologists, researchers specializing in horse, bee, and camel breeding and production, private sector experts, and PhD students. The training provided an exciting opportunity for these attendees to delve into fundamental topics in livestock farming.

During the training, local researchers also shared a case study of biodiversity in plants in different topographies near the Almaty region. Talgat Karymsakov, the Deputy Director General of the Kazakh Scientific Research Institute of Animal Husbandry and Forage Production, encouraged the participants to actively deploy the guidelines and welcome the FAO LEAP partnership to Kazakhstan with more LEAP guidelines.

Next steps

Following the initial success achieved in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, the series of training sessions in Central Asian countries continued with stops in Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan.

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