UNDP Green Aral Sea Initiative — Saxaul Afforestation on the Dried Seabed, Karakalpakstan

The Aral Sea has lost about 90% of its water since the 1960s, exposing roughly 2.7 million hectares of salt-crusted seabed in Uzbekistan's Karakalpakstan region, a major source of toxic dust storms. Since 2020, UNDP Uzbekistan has worked with the Ministry of Ecology and the State Committee of Forestry of Karakalpakstan on the Green Aral Sea initiative to stabilise this seabed with drought-resistant native shrubs, chiefly saxaul.

Between 2020 and 2025 the programme planted 823,000 trees across 658.2 hectares (60,000 trees/30 ha in 2020, rising to 200,000 trees/200 ha in 2024, and 80,000 saxaul seedlings on 80 ha at the Kazakhdarya forestry site near Muynak in March 2025). Funding comes from the Government of Japan and public crowdfunding at $1 (12,000 soms) per tree.

UNDP reports each hectare of mature saxaul plantation absorbs about 1,135 kg of CO2 and releases 835 kg of oxygen annually, and that a single shrub halts up to four tonnes of migrating sand, figures corroborated independently by Mongabay, which cites roughly 1.1 tonnes of CO2 absorbed per hectare per year and shrubs stopping 2–4 tonnes of sand.

The model is informing Kazakhstan's larger regional afforestation push under the World Bank's RESILAND CA+ programme, but seedling survival ranges from just 30% in low-rainfall years to 70% in wetter ones, and a Central Asian forestry specialist quoted by Mongabay warned that precipitation across Karakalpakstan fell to only 10mm over the 2020–2025 period, a real risk to the plantation's long-term survival that the programme has not yet resolved.