Forestry plays a minor but important role in the livelihoods of vulnerable population in Mongolia. The country has developed a Participatory Sustainable Forest Management (PSFM), integrating livestock raising with forestry. The project was designed to strengthen the PSFM process, thereby improving livelihoods and the ecological status of forests. The project reviewed the current forestry guidelines at both national and local government levels and forestry planning guidelines for Soum and Aimag levels were approved by the provincial Government promoting the participatory forest management (PFM). There were also advances to improve the policy and legal framework at national level, but lengthy policymaking process and need for increased inter-ministerial policy dialogues, among other issues, have challenged the full achievement of this outcome.

The project was designed to address the following interlinked barriers preventing sustainable land and forest management outcomes and building resilience to climate change in Kyrgyz mountain ecosystems: inadequate legal framework for sustainable forest and land management, inadequate land tenure reforms, outdated approaches to sustainable forest and land management, and limited capacity of local institutions. The project’s overall objective is to enhance the enabling environment in the forestry and agricultural sectors and sustain the flow of ecosystem services, including enhancement of carbon stocks in forests and agro-ecosystems through the sustainable management and enhanced productivity of mountainous silvo-agro-pastoral ecosystems, and to improve productivity and mountain livelihoods in the Kyrgyz Republic. Overall, the evaluation rated the project as “moderately satisfactory”, with several examples of positive new approaches introduced by the project into forestry, agriculture and pasture management. The evaluation included specific recommendations not only to FAO, but also to the national forestry service. One of the innovative recommendations is to revisit the project sites in five to ten years to check certain success factors, such as the tree survival rates.