RESILAND CA+ Program: Tajikistan Resilient Landscape Restoration Project

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The proposed Tajikistan Resilient Landscapes Restoration Project is a part of the Regional RESILAND CA+ Program, whose objective is to increase the resilience of regional landscapes in Central Asia, with particular focus on cross-border landscapes and collaborative efforts. The Project will apply landscape management approaches that seek to provide frameworks for allocating and managing land to achieve environmental, economic and social objectives in areas of multiple and often competing land uses. The project will build on lessons from ELMARL, CAMP4ASB and other Bank and donor-funded projects on forestry, pasture, agriculture, irrigation, disaster risk mitigation, and rural economy in the country. The Project will be implemented over a five-year period by the Committee for Environmental protection under the Government of the Republic of Tajikistan (CEP). The project will work with village and community-based/resource user groups and organizations taking responsibility for the choice, design and management of smaller-scale landscape and livelihood investments. At the same time, the project will work across sectors, e.g., with the State Forest Agency, Ministry of Energy and Water Resources, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Finance, as well as local administration and organizations (district, sub-district) to incorporate a landscape approach for investment planning. Project areas/districts have been selected based on a combination of criteria: poverty incidence, potential for integrated landscape restoration (incorporating pasture, agriculture, water, forestry, biodiversity), regional and transboundary corridors, and complementarity with government and donor-funded initiatives.The project is expected to contribute to resilience through project interventions that focus on: building technical capacities of land users and extension support, supporting institutions and access to information, undertaking of resource and climate risk assessments before selecting investments, implementing a range of sustainable land management and climate adaptation investments that also sequester carbon. Primary project beneficiaries are expected to be rural communities, private farmers and farmer groups, villages and village communities and resource user groups (e.g., for pasture) interested in adopting landscape restoration practices. These communities will benefit from technical and financial support to implement technologies and approaches that improve their livelihoods, increase their resilience, while also contributing to the restoration of ecosystem functions. government agencies are expected to benefit from technical support for integrated landscape planning in ways that attempt to reconcile different land uses at national and regional scales. Government institutions will also benefit from financing for restoration activities in forest, pasture and protected areas.