Joint NASA LCLUC Science Team Meeting with GOFC-GOLD CARIN, NEESPI and MAIRS on Land Use and Water Resources in Central Asia

Meeting Focus: 

Sustainable land and water resource management under a changing climate is one of the greatest challenges in Center Asia, as the nations in the region are heavily dependent on fragile drylands and limited arable lands and water resources that are changing as a result of extensive agricultural exploitation. With increasing demand for food by rising population, growing climate variability and warming trend in the region, the management of land and water has become a critical sustainable development issue. The long-term drivers of food and water security are economic development and climate change. However, the immediate and probably more important factors affecting the food and water security are land use changes driven by institutional change and economic incentives. Changes in land use and land cover have direct implications for water use, food production, and lifestyles of rural communities in the region. This creates challenges for food and water sustainability of all nations within the region. Strategies to ensure food and water sustainability, therefore, must consider all societal, environmental and economic factors. A number of regional and international efforts have been made to understand the causes, extent, rate and societal implications of land use changes in the region, but these efforts have not been synthesized or framed effectively to address emerging issues. This LCLUC Science Team meeting will serve as a forum for international negotiations on implementing NASA LCLUC programmatic objectives in the Central Asia Region and for developing informational scientific synthesis, as related to policy needs concerning food and water resources in the region. The synthesis will promptly become available to policy decision makers.