Incentives in Kazakhstan

Kazakstan¹ (1998) 
 
 
 
 
 
 

(2005)²

   The Forest Code dated July 8, 2003 and the RoK Law dated July 9, 2004, On Protection, Reproduction and Use of Animals include basic provisions regarding application of economic incentives for conservation and sustainable use of components of biological diversity. However, to be applied in practice, these provisions should be further elaborated in bylaws, relevant government programmes and should also be incorporated in the budget and tax legislation of the country. There is need to for the basic legislative provisions on economic incentives to be implemented in a detailed mechanism.

    The rational use of biological resources is stimulated through the “user pays” principle. According to the Law On Environmental Protection, there is a system of payments for using natural resources, including payments for using natural resources and payments for their protection and reproduction.

     Article 76 of the Law on Environmental Protection says that ‘control over environmental protection includes control of the environmental setting and changes caused by economic and other activities, control over implementation of plans and actions aimed at protection and sanitary improvement of the environment, reproduction and rational use of natural resources, environmental law enforcement, enforcement of quality standards and environment-related requirements.’

    The RoK Government Decree No 450 dated April 23, 2004 approved the rates for using biological resources. The users of natural resources are obliged to compensate the damage to the nature. The proceeds are used for environmental actions for biodiversity conservation.

    In Kazakhstan there are several types of environmental control: state, departmental, industrial and public control.

  – Temporary Instructions about the Procedures of Environmental Auditing for Existing Enterprises in the Republic of Kazakhstan, RND 211.3.02.01-96

    The materials of environmental audits at industrial enterprises consider, inter alia, adverse impacts threatening biodiversity and the causes of such impacts:

• Methodology of surveys and researches (monitoring) of environmental setting;
• Environmental impact assessment (soil, flora and fauna);
• Assessment of impact on people’s health;
• Development of measures for protection of components of biosphere (soil, flora and fauna).

  Environmental auditing in the context of environmental insurance is a business initiative for independent assessment of information regarding the state of equipment and its impact aimed to determine potential adverse impact on the environment during the production process as well as potential damage that can be caused to the people and legal entities as a result of a crisis or a catastrophe. The draft law on Mandatory Environmental Insurance includes a section (Article 22) regarding environmental auditing. According to the draft law, such environmental audit shall be carried out before signing a mandatory insurance contract.

   Government Environmental Appraisal (GEA), which is an equivalent to Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is one of the newest governmental functions on environmental protection. As a preventive measure it is aimed to prevent implementation of programmes and projects which may prove to exercise a harmful effect on the environment or to introduce alterations which help minimizing the harmful impacts.

     Environmental License is a permission issued by the authorized government agency for specific activities or actions. The legislative basis for environmental licensing is provided by the Law on Licensing, the Law On Environmental Protection, Government Decrees and other regulations.

Currently some programmes are under development aimed to determine and to introduce economic incentives for biodiversity conservation. Thus, on July 25, 2005 the RoK Government approved the Zhasyl Yel Programme for 2005-2007. To facilitate forestation in the country it is planned to consider and to submit to the RoK Government the proposals for improving the legislation aimed at development of private forestry, particularly, tax preferences, free planting stock and consultations to farmers, etc. The programme envisages the transfer of state-owned reserve and other land to private ownership for creation of private forestry as well as drafting of legislation to provide loans and other preferences to individuals and non-governmental organizations for creation of private forests. 

  The current system of public management for environmental protection is determined by the RoK Law On Environmental Protection and a series of other laws and regulations, i.e. it is based on purely administrative approaches. The use of limitations of nature use and penal sanctions are not always effective and fail to promote the conservation of biological diversity. Therefore, there is a need to introduce economic incentives, to seek and to attract additional funds to secure conservation of biological diversity and balanced use of biological resources.

    The key to stimulation is the inclusion of the priorities of biological diversity conservation into the long-term strategy, Kazakhstan 2030 as an element of sustainable development. The essence of eco-nomic incentives is to provide impacts on production activities, to create conditions providing for rational environmental management and for conservation of biological diversity.

    The fundamentals of the mechanism are laid down in the RoK Law On Environmental Protection, in the Tax, Forestry and Water Codes; in the RoK Laws On Protection, Reproduction and Use of Wildlife, On Land, and On Protected Areas as well as in other by-laws encouraging the users of natural re-sources to use them rationally.

   At present the economic mechanism for biological diversity conservation is based on payments for the use of wildlife, protected areas and forests, which are regulated by the new Tax Code enacted on January 1, 2002. The amounts of abovementioned payments are determined in a centralized manner by the Government of Kazakhstan. As for PAs, one of the economic incentives is that they are exempted from the land tax.

   At the same time, the regulations concerning economic incentives in the area of biological diversity conservation and sustainable development of its components were extended in the Kazakhstani legisla-tion several years ago when drafting and approving the new editions of the Forestry and Land Codes and the Law On Protection, Reproduction and Use of Wildlife. However, the enforcement arrangements of the relevant measures have not been developed yet. They are expected to be included into the relevant government, sectoral and regional programmes, like the Zhasyl Yel Programme.

    So far, the common constraint for implementation of comprehensive economic incentives for biodiversity conservation is the lack of the relevant Strategy and Action Plan for implementation of the Convention to be approved by the Government. The indicators regarding the achievement of the ninth Millennium Development Goal regarding increase in PA and forest coverage in Kazakhstan are not linked to specific economic incentives, especially for PAs.

Constraints encountered in implementation:

• lack of available data and expertise
• lack of financial, human and technical resources
• lack of economic incentives.