Kazakhstan has quietly become one of the world's great conservation success stories — and its president wants the planet to help keep it that way. Speaking at a Leaders' Summit ahead of the UN biodiversity conference COP17 in Yerevan on October 16, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev pitched an international fund for rare species and proposed Almaty as home to a new regional office of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity Secretariat.
The headline number is remarkable: the saiga antelope, once teetering on extinction, has rebounded from just 21,000 animals in 2003 to 4.7 million as of this spring. Kazakhstan now hosts roughly 98% of the world's entire saiga population. Snow leopards are back too, with around 190 cats roaming the mountains — about 70% of their habitat falls inside protected areas — up from critically low numbers in the 1990s.
June brought the most symbolic moment: for the first time in 70 years, a Turan tiger was released into the wild in Kazakhstan, the fruit of cooperation with Russia, the UN Development Programme and WWF. Przewalski's horses are being restored with help from Czech, German and Hungarian partners.
But there's a worrying counterpoint. The Caspian seal population has collapsed from around one million to 270,000 over the past century, and the species now sits on Kazakhstan's endangered list. Tokayev urged the five Caspian littoral states to act together, invoking the Aral Sea — the Soviet-era disaster that turned a vast inland sea into desert — as a warning. "We must not allow the Caspian Sea to suffer the same fate," he said.
Beyond species, Kazakhstan is pushing a ten-year National Biodiversity Conservation Program, a national genetic biodiversity bank, the Astana Declaration on Environmental Solidarity in Central Asia, and an International Water Organization under the UN umbrella. There's also a tech angle: the president wants the International Center for Artificial Intelligence in Astana used for ecosystem monitoring, environmental risk forecasting and specialist training.
Why should travellers care? Because Kazakhstan is one of the least-visited big countries on Earth, and its wildlife is its most compelling draw. The steppe where saigas now thunder by the million, the Tien Shan mountains where snow leopards persist, and the Caspian shoreline with its rare seals are experiences almost nowhere else can offer. A well-funded conservation push — and more protected areas — should mean better ranger infrastructure, more responsible wildlife tours, and a reason to put Kazakhstan on the map before the crowds arrive. The Caspian's troubles, meanwhile, are a reminder that some of these spectacles have a deadline.
This story matters most to anyone plotting a Central Asia trip with a wildlife or ecotourism focus, from birders in the steppe to trekkers hoping for a glimpse of a snow leopard track in the high country.
Story via The Astana Times.
