Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) -- A project submitted with the assistance of the Ministry of Innovative Development of the Republic of Uzbekistan and Professor Kristina Toderich (Tottori University) was approved in the SATREPS-2020 competition (Japan). This project was recognized as the best among 10 international projects selected by the Japan Agency for Science and Technology (JST).

The project on the theme “Development of new technologies for monitoring and controlling the use of water resources to combat salinization and improve land productivity and food security in the Aral region” was developed by the International Aral Center of the Aral Sea under the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan together with Professor Kenji Tanaka and Dr. Temur Khuzhanazarov (Kyoto University) together with leading scientists from 8 universities in Japan. From the Uzbek side, the project involved UzGIP LLC, UzHydromet, Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Agricultural Mechanization Engineers, the Karakalpak branch of Tashkent Agrarian University, Nukus National University, as well as the private sector - PANAEV FARMS and AKMANGIT-LAKRITSA in Karakalpakstan.

SATREPS is a Japanese government program for developing collaborative international research. The program is aimed at bilateral cooperation between the Japan Agency for Science and Technology (JST), the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the host state.

For 2020 fiscal year, the JST Agency recived 95 project proposals to SATREPS from researchers from Japan in three research areas - environment / energy, bioresources, and disaster prevention and mitigation. The selection committee tentatively selected 10 new projects - 5 projects collaborating with Asian researchers, 2 projects from Africa, 2 projects from South America and 1 project from Europe. It is worth noting that the selection takes place according to strict technical and scientific criteria, in several stages, only 10% of all submitted projects go to the final selection.

The Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) praised the proposed project, and for the first time, the SATREPS program will be presented in Uzbekistan and Central Asia as a whole.

The project with the participation of the Republic of Uzbekistan was selected for the first time, in connection with which Uzbekistan became 51 countries from among the countries selected for the SATREPS projects. It provides for direct investment in the formation and creation of a modern center for observing climate change, meteorological monitoring, as well as introducing new Japanese technologies in agriculture under salinization conditions in order to increase land productivity and improve the well-being of local communities with limited access to water in the Aral Sea region.

The project aims to create a new system of meteorological observations and direct forecasting, as well as to scale the best Japanese and local technologies for crop diversification and rotation, value added and marketing of finished agricultural products in conditions of severe salinization, especially in the Amu Darya delta, taking into account the requirements developed the Uzbek side. The implementation of this project is directly aimed at finding adaptation measures to climate change and sustainable development of food security and nutrition quality.