Yashil Makon - Uzbekistan's Billion-Tree Pledge, Its Reporting-Fraud Scandal, and the UNDP-Backed Correction

In November 2021, Uzbekistan's government launched 'Yashil Makon' (Green Nation), pledging to plant 1 billion trees and shrubs over five years and raise national tree cover from 8% to 30%. Within a year, investigative reporting by Daryo.uz (October 2022) found the programme's own record-keeping had failed: 6.2 million tree saplings recorded as 'planted' had never actually been registered as such, 2.4 million seedlings died before the end of spring from lack of water and inadequate care, and 341,000 seedlings were planted on unsuitable land without regard to local climatic conditions.

In response, Uzbekistan's Ministry of Ecology, Environmental Protection and Climate Change partnered with UNDP on a feasibility study and master plan for afforestation, published in 2023, explicitly designed to account for seedling survival rates and to set technical standards for site selection, planting technique and species choice. A parallel digitisation effort built a national information system that by January 2024 held records for more than 250 million individual trees, each tagged with type, age, height, condition and coordinates, intended to let the government verify planting claims rather than rely on self-reported totals.

Yashil Makon is included here as an evidenced cautionary case: the original planting claims were significantly overstated and poorly executed, but the subsequent UNDP-backed monitoring and master-planning response is a concrete, verifiable governance correction worth tracking rather than a success story to imitate uncritically.

Read the full analysis: https://www.gazeta.uz/en/2024/10/24/yashil-makon/