CoED Leaflet: Estimating costs of environmental degradation in the mountains of Tajikistan EN

Abstract

With only 7 percent of agricultural land, Tajikistan is a mountainous country located at the heart of Central Asian region, prone to desertification, salinization, soil erosion and forest loss. The first step to address the issue is to measure the real cost of degradation of the agricultural land. The full costs of land degradation are believed to be high and increasing but they are also difficult to measure. Previous attempts to evaluate the impacts of land degradation had been based on the cost-benefit analysis, using secondary data complemented with expert and individual estimates, to compare the total economic benefits of land restoration to the economic costs of restoring degraded land.