Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) - The Foreign Ministers of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, as well as the Deputy Foreign Minister of Afghanistan, will meet with German Federal Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on 28 January 2020 in Berlin.

A conference at the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin will launch the Green Central Asia project, which addresses the effects of climate change in Central Asia. It also includes a dialogue with representatives of academia and civil society on the creation of cooperative ties between actors in Germany and in the region.

Climate change has a diverse impact on foreign and security policy. Rising oceans, desertification and ecosystem destruction are increasingly depriving people around the world of livelihoods. In Central Asia and Afghanistan, climate change, among other things, due to the melting of high mountain glaciers, has a particularly strong effect on water, land and soil. With its Green Central Asia initiative, Germany wants to facilitate a regional dialogue on climate change impacts and associated risks. It also contributes to the implementation of the European Union Central Asia Strategy adopted on 17 June 2019.

The cooperation covers areas such as water, glacier protection, energy, biodiversity, land management and agriculture and will be implemented at the subnational, national and regional levels. Over the next four years, in Central Asia and Afghanistan, under the name “Green Central Asia”, among other things, improved access to information will be created, scientific cooperation will be expanded, and through its high-level political dialogue, assistance will be given to its concrete implementation.

The Green Central Asia Initiative will build on the successes of the Central Asia Water Initiative (the so-called “Berlin Process”), which Germany launched in 2008 to strengthen regional cooperation on water issues and, thus, sustainable water management in the basin Aral Sea.

The program was implemented from 2009 to 2020 with partial funding from the European Union in all five countries of Central Asia and supported competent institutions in developing legal frameworks and practical approaches for sustainable water resources management. Activities were complemented by pilot projects that covered areas such as rehabilitation of water infrastructure, the introduction of water-saving irrigation technologies and the construction of a small hydroelectric power station in a remote region before creating databases and maps using geographic information systems.

More than 500,000 people whose incomes are closely related to irrigated agriculture, and many others who live in the pilot areas of the program, now benefit from affordable and planned water supplies.