In 2006, a collection of nonprofits and the government of Kazakhstan launched a project to save the dwindling population of saiga antelope, which live in the Golden Steppe, a huge grassland three times the size of the United Kingdom. Since then, the saiga antelope population has risen from 30,000 to 4 million, reports Mongabay:
For this monumental effort, the project was awarded the 2024 Earthshot Prize in the “protect & restore nature” category. This prize, launched by David Attenborough and Britain’s Prince William, also provides a grant of 1 million pounds ($1.32 million) to each winner…
The Association for the Conservation Biodiversity of Kazakhstan… details the cultural and technological methods used to bring the saiga back from the brink and to help restore this massive grassland ecosystem, and shares lessons learned along the way, plus hopes and plans for the future.
“When [the] initiative [was] started, the saiga would be always like the flagship and the priority species because we did have this emergency case to recover saiga,” the Association’s Vera Voronova says. “But the whole … picture of restoring the [steppe] was always behind this, and will be now a long term strategy.”
Voronova emphasizes the importance of local community participation in this effort, pointing to the role of local landowners residing in ecological corridors between protected areas, and education programs on the value of Kazakh wildlife for children especially.
“One of the recent book[s] that we published was about specifically the steppe animals, because as a child, I grew up knowing a lot about African animals and very little about what kind of animals live in my country,” Voronova says. “And this is exactly [what] we want to change, [the] attitude of the people, to know more about nature they live close to.”
The Golden Steppe is in the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan, the world’s ninth-largest country by land area and the largest landlocked country. Kazakhstan is huge, over a million square miles, but it has only about 20 million people. It is a major producer of oil and natural gas.
Kazakhstan’s snow leopard population has doubled in recent years.
Wild horses recently returned to Kazakhstan after being absent for two hundred years.
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A giant fish believed to be extinct was found in the Mekong River in Southeast Asia. Crocodiles are making a comeback in Cambodia.
