Back from the Brink: Saving the Saiga Antelope in Kazakhstan

When I'm trying to describe the steppes, I always want to tell their different feelings. Feeling of wind, feeling of sound, and also it's the smell of the grass. The steppes cover around 41 percent of our country. I spend a lot of time in this nature and it's something inside you, so it's an important landscape that we need to conserve and protect. I'm Vera Voronova and I will show you how we're conserving and restoring a prehistoric landscape with modern technologies, local knowledge, and global partnership. On the steppe, you can drive the whole day and you don't see any people, no power lines, no roads. It looks like it's empty, but there are big mammals like saiga antelope. Actually, it's an antelope with more long and strange nose and usually people, when reminded about nose, they say, oh yeah, I've seen the picture of this animal. The saiga, its population has fluctuated many times, but in the 90s, it was significantly reduced because of illegal poaching. For 10 years, it was 90 percent lost of the species and in 2004, the number of saiga was only 20,000 animals left. That situation was critical. It's become to be clear that the only solution is to create a protected area. So the government of Kazakhstan, together with the international partner, joined together to establish Altyndalak Conservation Initiative. One of the keystones for Altyndalak is the partnership. Our organization works very closely with the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources. The government of Kazakhstan provides protection on the ground. National legislation would be approved on the border controls. Where the government would lead on the protection of the species, the non-government organization would contribute new knowledge, new technologies, and also to expand the scientific research for the effective conservation measures. Tracking saiga, it's quite challenging. In 2009, we started a satellite telemetry program in order to understand the migration. We managed more than 400 collars to install for the saiga. Data we use in different purpose, we use to understand where they actually migrate, provide the data for state rangers, and to make a new protected area. When you look to the steppe, the wildlife too can be invisible even in the open landscape. But now we conduct survey for saiga, which we do every year. We do now have 2.8 million of the saiga across the whole country. I think it felt like, okay, now it's the moment, finally. I think the priority now is to think on the future. The Kazakh people, they very much in love with the landscape and nature. We do work with the local communities, specifically focusing on the young generation to provide education for the kids about the nature they live around. And we don't know whom those kids would be. Maybe some of them will go to work for the border controls, some of them would build the roads and think about saiga migration. And this is our focus to bring resources for the local communities to work with their young generation. When I think about our success, the size of the protection zone for the steppe was increased five times. There are more ranger patrolling groups. For the saiga, we have a satellite tagging program. And now we're thinking about the restoration of the wild horses. I think it's a really great motivation to think about what kind of environment we would create for our children. That we're trying to protect the nature for them in the future, but at the same time teach them how to protect this nature even better.