OSCE Centre in Dushanbe

The OSCE Centre in Dushanbe monitors environmental developments and assists Tajikistan in its efforts to tackle land degradation and radioactive contamination. The Centre also helps the Government develop environmental strategies and legislation, supports environmental activists and facilitates regional OSCE environmental activities.

Developing an environmental strategy and legislation

The Centre helped to draft a national environmental strategy for 2005-2020 and other strategies that address water and waste management, as well as environmental monitoring to improve legislation, institutional capacity and establish priorities for solving ecological problems. The Centre has also supported the drafting of the Law on Environmental Protection and five by-laws to be adopted by parliament in 2007.

Reversing land degradation

The Centre assists the Government in addressing the problems of land degradation and erosion that affect over 97 per cent of the country's territory. As part of OSCE awareness-raising campaigns, more than 1 million people have received training on environmental issues in the Khatlon and Sugd regions. The Centre also supported residents of the Rasht Valley and Khatlon region in southern and eastern Tajikistan in planting some 600,000 saplings to help stop land degradation and erosion.

Radioactive waste management

Radioactive pollution poses a threat to some 10 million people living in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan along the Syr-Darya River basin. The Centre helps the Tajik Government in dealing with radioactive waste management. In 2004, it organized the first international conference that openly addressed the problem, and it supported a project to draft a map of highly radioactive sites in northern Tajikistan, install warning signs and raise awareness.

More than 7.7 million tones of radioactive waste have been stored in Taboshar, northern Tajikistan, since the Soviet era. In 2006, to help the Government protect the health of Taboshar residents, the Centre sponsored the rehabilitation of a mud slide trap, damaged irrigation pipelines, and ditches in and around the town. These efforts helped prevent potable water from being contaminated.

Implementing the Aarhus Convention

Implementing the provisions of the Aarhus Convention - which focuses on access to information, public participation in decision-making, and access to justice in environmental matters - is an important part of the Centre's activities in the environmental field.

Aarhus Centres in Dushanbe and Khujand in northern Tajikistan publish information materials, organize seminars to raise awareness on the convention and provide journalists and the population with information on environmental issues. The Aarhus Centre in Dushanbe also created a website (www.aarhus.land.ru) to promote the convention.

Green Patrols

Since 2003, the Centre has supported a group of young Tajik environmental activists, known as "Green Patrols" because of their involvement in a project financed by the OSCE and other Environment and Security Initiative partners. In 2006, Green Patrols created the central Green Youth Organization. The Centre helps Green Patrols publish the monthly "Compass" magazine to raise awareness of the most pressing environmental issues.

In 2006, the best Green Patrols activists from across the country participated in an OSCE-funded national ecological summer camp, and an international youth forum in Dushanbe. The forum brought together environmental activists and scientists from Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia and Uzbekistan, who shared their experiences and discussed ways of co-ordinating efforts to protect the environment.

Promoting transboundary water co-operation

The Centre continues to encourage and facilitate dialogue among Central Asian states on managing transboundary water resources in the region. The aim is to prevent conflicts from arising over shared water resources and find ways to co-operate more closely in managing the region's water.