Huge Success to Bring Back the Saiga Antelope

Thanks to nearly two decades of dedicated conservation work, the population of the once-endangered saiga antelope has soared from 30,000 to nearly 4 million across Kazakhstan’s Golden Steppe. The conservation initiative was even rewarded for its efforts in protecting and restoring nature.

“When [the] initiative [was] started, the saiga would be always like the flagship and the priority species because we did have this emergency case to recover saiga,” explains Vera Voronova, executive director of the NGO Association for the Conservation Biodiversity of Kazakhstan. “But the whole … picture of restoring the [steppe] was always behind this and will be now a long-term strategy.”

International NGOs and the government of Kazakhstan came together in 2006, founding the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative – Altyn Dala means “Golden Steppe” in the Kazakh language – to save the grassland ecosystem thrice the size of the United Kingdom and, by extension, the endangered saiga antelope from extinction. The large migratory herbivore’s population went from roughly 30,000 individuals to almost 4 million. The Initiative won the 2024 Earshot Prize in the “Protect & Restore Nature” category. The global environmental award launched by Sir David Attenborough and Britain’s Prince William grants $1.32 million to five winners.