On June 1, a working meeting was held with the local community in the village of Shabdan, Chui region, as part of the international Community Conservation and Resilience Initiative (CCRI).
The goal of the Community Conservation and Resilience Initiative (CCRI) is to assist in the implementation of the Strategic Plan of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) 2011-2020 and the Aichi Targets by developing recommendations on creating effective and appropriate forms of support for community conservation. The initiative conducts joint assessments of the resilience of community environmental conservation initiatives in at least 20 countries (including Russia, Iran, Panama, Chile, Paraguay, Kyrgyz Republic, and others), as well as support that should be provided to strengthen these initiatives globalforestcoalition.org. The results of the assessment will be widely disseminated through an active information and advocacy campaign and will be taken into account at the Convention on Biological Diversity and in relevant international policy processes.
In Kyrgyzstan, the Initiative is implemented by the BIOM Ecological Movement in partnership with the State Agency for Environmental Protection and Forestry. The international initiator of the Initiative is the Global Forest Coalition network, supported by the Christensen Fund and the Government of Germany. As part of information meetings, there are also meetings with women from local communities to assess traditional knowledge and the possibility of preserving it for the sustainable use of biodiversity, as well as ecosystems of forests and pastures. Such meetings are held in all 20 pilot countries globalforestcoalition.org/women2030.
In the village of Shabdan, the public organization Onuru-Bulagy preserves traditional apple varieties. They have organized a nursery for growing apple trees from wild apple seeds that children collect in the mountains on the school grounds. The nursery will help preserve local apple varieties and grow more resilient varietal trees from them. Within the framework of the CCRI, this initiative has been supported. Resources have been allocated for fencing the area and informational signs that will allow students and the local community to learn about local plant species.
The village has a very strong active group of women, some of whom have worked as shepherds and now have extensive experience and knowledge on sustainable pasture management. At the meeting, they talked about the traditional timings of vertical migrations, which allowed pastures to recover.
Based on the results of the working meetings, the collected materials will be presented at a national seminar aimed at promoting local community initiatives at the national level. One such initiative is the possibility of creating local protected areas, so-called micro-reserves. We hope that it will be reflected at the decision-making level in our country and allow local communities to preserve their natural and cultural values.