On February 8-9, the Archabil Hotel in the capital hosted the two-day Inter-Ministerial Consultations on “Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems Nexus”. The event was organized by the USAID Regional Water and Environment Project (WAVE) and the Kazakh-German University (DKU).
Inter-Ministerial Consultations on natural resources were held with the participation of specialists from relevant ministries and departments of Turkmenistan, representatives of the USAID mission in Turkmenistan, the Regional Environmental Center for Central Asia (CAREC) and the organizers of the meeting WAVE and DKU.
The meeting of experts in Ashgabat was the final in a series of regional inter-ministerial consultations held within the framework of the project “Training for Government Officials from Central Asia on Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems Nexus”. This project is supported by the USAID Regional Water and Environment Project and launched at DKU on December 2, 2021.
The project program included a series of national trainings in five countries of Central Asia – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The first inter-ministerial consultations were held in Almaty in April 2022, then during the past year, the consultations were held in Dushanbe, Bishkek and Tashkent.
The training manual for teaching “Interdependence of water, energy and food security and natural resources in the context of Central Asia” and “Model Modular-Teaching Nexus Assessment Toolkit” developed by the DKU regional consultants on the basis of this manual were used as a methodology for inter-ministerial consultations.
During the event, the possibilities of strengthening the technical capacity and regional cooperation on transboundary water resources management in Central Asia to enhance stability, economic prosperity and healthy ecosystems were discussed and considered.
The participants of the meeting in Ashgabat, including representatives of relevant government agencies, had the opportunity to get acquainted in detail with the methodology to assess the interdependence of water, energy, food and ecosystems, as well as to propose recommendations for finalizing the methodological draft document to enrich its effectiveness.
The training included theoretical and practical trainings. In the theoretical part, on specific examples, the NEXUS approach and its promotion in Turkmenistan were presented to specialists. The practical part of the consultations took place in the group works, where the participants performed as managers of one or another natural resource of a simulated macro-region. The participants were aimed to assess the available resources and optimize their use, taking into account the benefits for each of the sectors of the economy.
On outcomes of the inter-ministerial consultations, Turkmen specialists prepared their recommendations for improvement of the methodological manual, and expressed their interest in adapting the final version for young specialists and students of post-graduate extension courses.
