This publication is part of the overarching GIZ (“Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit”1) program “Capacity Development for climate policy in the countries of South East, Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia, Phase III”.
This project is part of the International Climate Initiative (IKI). The Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) supports this initiative on the basis of a decision adopted by the German Bundestag.

In 2016, the United Nations (UN) adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 169 sub-goals. Sub-goal 15.3 aims for a "Land Degradation Neutral" (LDN) world by 2030, to be achieved through national efforts of the UN member states. Since 2018, countries supporting LDN have been requested to report to the UN on the state and change of state of three globally recognized indicators: land use, land productivity (recorded as net primary production), and soil organic carbon stocks (SOCstocks) within their national borders. Accordingly, land degradation is neutral when all indicators show at least no deterioration of their status. Reporting can be done using the global dataset provided by the Secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) (Tier 1), although the UNCCD recommends that indicators shall be compiled based on national data (Tier 2 and Tier 3). Previous experience from various countries shows that the use of global datasets sometimes leads to inaccuracies. However, there is a lack of national data available, especially for the indicator SOCstock. The SOCstock indirectly provides information on the humus content of soils and is thus an indicator of soil health. It is also highly relevant to climate change since a loss of soil carbon releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and accelerates global warming.

In 2017, Kyrgyz Republic declared its participation in the national measuring of LDN. The first LDN report, prepared by the national LDN working group in 2018, identified serious gaps in national carbon stock data and provided recommendations for the development of LDN assessment and monitoring. The German-Kyrgyz project "Development of Methods for the Assessment of Carbon Reservoirs and for the Improvement of Climate Reporting of Agricultural Ecosystems of Central Asia" (CARB-ASIA) builds on previous work of the LDN working group and aims to develop and test the applicability of an improved method for assessing SOCstocks in Kyrgyz Republic and to propose ways to institutionalize such an assessment tailored to the possibilities in Kyrgyz Republic.

The results of this project have been discussed in various forms (e.g. during interviews and expert consultations, workshops and online discussions) with representatives of government institutions (the Kyrgyz Ministry of Agriculture, Food Industry and Melioration; the National Statistical Committee; State Agency for Environmental Protection and Forestry), international organizations, and NGOs as well as national experts from science and research. The proposed method is scientifically based and adapted to international standards. We hope that the recognition of the data generated using this method as official data will facilitate monitoring and reporting to UNCCD. It also provides opportunities for coordinated monitoring and reporting to other international conventions and initiatives, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The adoption and implementation of the proposed method can therefore serve as an important step towards the country's efficient compliance with international requirements.

About CARB-ASIA
CARB-ASIA is an interdisciplinary project of soil scientists and resource economists from Humboldt University of Berlin as well as Kyrgyz universities, NGOs, and state authorities that jointly developed a method to assess carbon stocks for different land-use types in Kyrgyz Republic. Based on a national survey of the current state of soil carbon stocks, implications for sustainable land use are derived, which contribute to the protection and increase of carbon stocks in the soils and improve climate monitoring and reporting for agricultural ecosystems according to international standards.

List of authors
M. Korintenberg, A. Gotgelf, E. Baibagyshov, R. Judis, U. Kasymov, J. Walter, S. Lange, P. Neetzow, K. Eisenack, J. Zeitz