Media for improved reporting on environmental and natural resources in Central Asia is a project funded by the European Union and implemented by Internews in five countries – Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan – whose aim in to improve the quality of information available to policy makers and citizens around environmental and natural resource issues in the region.

Research was conducted in order to better understand: a) who are the main media outlets in each of the target countries, b) whether any of the main media outlets publish information related to environmental and natural resources issues and what their proportion is compared to overall content output and c) what is the quality of reporting around environmental and natural resources issues.

Internews, lead by the Senior Monitoring and Evaluation Manager – Yulye Jessica Romo Ramos – designed the approach as well as provided technical support and supervision to SIAR Research & Consulting, a company based in Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan), whom executed this research. Media monitoring, content analysis, key informant interviews as well as literature review were the main methodologies used for this research.

The main findings demonstrate low availability and quality of information on environmental and natural resources issues in the region, with common characteristics shared between target countries – for more details please consult full report. These findings helped identify recommendations to fine-tune the intervention, particularly around capacity-building of media beneficiaries, and will also serve as baseline for the project.