This year the Netherlands Funds-in-Trust (NFiT) marks the 25 years of cooperation with UNESCO and supported 78 World Heritage properties around the globe. One of them is the Tanbaly World Heritage site in Kazakhstan, nominated onto the World Heritage List in 1994, as the first World Heritage Site for Kazakhstan and the first petroglyph site for the Central Asia region.
“The Tanbaly World Heritage Site Conservation and Development” Project was approved in 2026 and comes at a crucial momentum.
During the last five years (2021-2026) the situation onsite has changed. Recent global promotion of Central Asian countries as ideal cultural and natural tourism hubs has led to a significant increase of tourist visitation in Kazakhstan. Harsher winters and hotter summers, due to climate change, with increased effect on the Central Asian steppe, have created additional conservation issues.
With this seed funding, the project will enable to carry out the initial work to strengthen national technical capacities to support long-term preservation and monitoring measures.
Early November the Regional UNESCO Office in Almaty initiated a meeting with leadership of the Tanbaly Museum, responsible for the management of the World Heritage Site to discuss the implementation plan, focusing on the introduction of digital technologies for management, conservation and archiving and the improvement of tourist visitation facilities.
