In the cold winter deserts of Turan
Exploration and geography in the work of Jens Wunderlich
Alessandra Navazio
Geography helps us to grasp the transformations of territories and the relationships that run through and connect them. But what happens if the map that is supposed to represent them is empty? We found out with Jens Wunderlich, who has been working with the Succow Stiftung to promote the Turan cold winter deserts as a world heritage site
«The cold winter deserts of Turan were, until recently, like a blank map. Yes, like a blank map to be discovered,» confesses Jens Wunderlich excitedly. «There have been many searches for gas and oil deposits by mining companies but none from an ecological point of view. Many valuable species and ecosystem mechanisms in these deserts are barely known, not least because many people would need help finding countries like Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan on the map». Why are there territories that everyone knows about and territories that are underrepresented? How much do maps affect our way of thinking? And on ecosystems? Does geography, which by definition describes places1, play a role in all this? Jens Wunderlich’s work and his explorations in cold winter deserts provide us with a possible answer.
Jens Wunderlich is a geographer by training, specializing in protected areas of international recognition like World Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserves. Born in East Germany behind the iron curtain, he has always wanted to travel and experience the world. He began his career working for various NGOs in Central Asia and later for German International Cooperation (GIZ) in Turkmenistan, a program for sustainable resource managemant in Central Asia commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). He currently is heading the “Protected Areas and Biosphere” department of the Michael Succow Foundation, in which he has worked since 2010 and, through which, he participated in the Central Asia Desert Initiative (CADI) project from 2016 to 2023 as team leader for conservation components of the project. The German foundation, founded in 1999 by Michael Succow, holder of the Right Livelihood Award and father of the National Park Program in the reunified Germany, is renown for collaborative conservation projects in Europe and Asia.
Discover the Succow Stiftung Discover the CADI projectWhere the cold deserts are
Cold winter deserts are mostly found in the central part of Eurasia2, i.e. in an area extending from the Islamic Republic of Iran through the countries of Central Asia – Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – to Mongolia, with small areas also in South and North America, such as the Patagonian desert or the Great Plains.
They are called “cold winter” because of the temperatures in winter, but it is the seasonal temperature range that makes them “extreme”. «Temperatures fluctuate between -40°C in winter and +50°C in summer,» specifies Jens Wunderlich, «with a temperature range of almost 100 degrees over the year, which is unparalleled in hot deserts».
Among the cold winter deserts, those rising in the Turan, i.e. the lowlands between Turkmenistan, Iran, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, are one of the largest expanses of sand in the world. Jens Wunderlich explored them thanks to the CADI-Central Asia Desert Initiative3, which ran from 2016 to 2022 and involved the University of Greifswald and the Michael Succow Foundation, where Wunderlich works, to carry out studies on the ecosystem of the deserts, the species that live there and their protection and management, and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) to find more sustainable livelihoods for desert areas. The CADI project has not only led to the nomination of the ‘Turan Cold Winter Deserts’ as a UNESCO World Heritage Site4 in 2023 but also enabled investment in the promotion of new scientific knowledge, the establishment of new protected areas and the strengthening of existing ones.
Who inhabits the empty map?
The first mission to the Ustyurt Plateau was in 2020: 20 people, for three weeks, hundreds of kilometres away from sources of food, water, petrol and medical support. «There was a need to do field expeditions because of the great lack of information about species occurrence, abundance and distribution» says Wunderlich. «And for many expeditions, we had to travel a lot: just to reach and leave the site in the Karakum desert in Turkmenistan, for example, it took a week of travelling by jeep. During the journey, at lunchtime, it was sometimes even necessary to lie down under the car because it was the only shade available miles away». Despite this, the various CADI expeditions involved scientists not only from abroad like Germany or Russia but also of many kind of disciplines from the region. «All of them were willing to join the expeditions because the discoveries we made each time were extraordinary, new and unprecedented» explains Wunderlich.
The desert territories of Turan are, in fact, a uniquely complex system of ecosystems with unspoilt nature, biodiversity hotspots and largely unexplored life forms that have adapted to the extreme temperatures. Many protect our ecosystems, even if they are far away from us, as in the case of the Saxaul tree that occurs in forest clusters and can sequester and store, in deserts, immense amounts of carbon not only in their above ground biomass but also in their extensive and deep root networks carbon, like the mangrove.
The best times to explore the cold winter deserts are spring or autumn, not only because of the less extreme temperatures but also because these are the most interesting times for scientific and naturalistic discoveries. «In April, for example, is the flowering season for ephemeral plants,» Wunderlich tells us, «that is, plants that bloom only once in their life, for a few days, and then disappear,» leaving no trace of themselves other than that of their dispersed seeds.
«In these expeditions, we found several new plant species. If I have to say, however, what is the most surprising result of the expeditions,» confesses Jens Wunderlich, «for me it is definitely the observation of the Asiatic Wild Ass (Equus hemionus kulan) at the Ustyurt Plateau in Uzbekistan, used to be listed as extinct in the wild in Uzbekistan. Most likely they came from Turkmenistan although there are fences at the border”. Another similar case was that of a Persian leopard (Panthera pardus tulliana) in the southwest of Kazakhstan, the first to be spotted alive in the country. “It was kind of miraculous to have him at the camera trap”. The nearest know occurrence was 500 km south in Turkmenistan, again behind the border fence. The finding resulted in its inclusion to the “Red Data Book” of Kazakhstan and the immediate elaboration of a “Persian Leopard Action Plan” and adoption by the Kazakh government.
The boundless nature of the desert
Nature knows no geo-political boundaries and the deserts of Turan are clear proof of this, with migratory corridors of more than 300 species of birds and ungulate mammals such as gazelles, steppe antelopes or the urial: cross-border creatures that meet barbed wire fences and the limits of a purely human geography. The highest expression is found in the Ustyurt Plateau where the borders of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan meet.
This is where geography can come into play. In the CADI project and its developments, «of course, interdisciplinary cooperation is one of the pillars,» says Jens Wunderlich. One of the forms of cooperation is with the local scientific community. «In our research and expeditions, we always cooperate with local scientists who have a long history of science behind them5. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many scientists left the region, but the Succow Foundation concluded cooperation agreements with many local and local institutions such as the institutes of Botany in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan or the “National Institute of Deserts and Flora and Fauna” (NIDFF)6 in Turkmenistan, which were then involved in the CADI project».
Another example for cooperation facilitated through the CADI project was that thanks to CADI, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan joined the IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) in 2019 and 2024, respectively. And later, in February 2024 at the Conference of the Parties (COP) 14 of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species (CMS) 7 that took place in Samarkand, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan signed a Memorandum of Cooperation for wildlife conservationonthe Ustyurt Plateau, while Turkmenistan announced to join soon. The Memorandum aims to address the problems caused by linear infrastructure like fences along the border and ensure infrastructure suitable for migratory wildlife as well.
«This shows us that the CADI project and the successful inscription of the Cold Winter Deserts of Turan as a transnational UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site are also improving cooperation between the countries for the benefit of biodiversity and ecosystem conservation».
Geography to go beyond
In April 2004, the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature)8, after carrying out comparative studies on the coverage of natural and mixed World Heritage (WH)9 sites, realised that winter cold winter deserts were not represented, as opposed to rainforests, which had about 30 sites in 2004, or high mountain areas (with about 50 sites), and defined a priority list of all ecosystems to be protected in the future and to which global attention should be brought because they are unique complexes of biodiversity. Among them are cold winter deserts. «The CADI project,» says Wunderlich, «has been a promising menchanism to shed light at the white spots in conservation sciences and put them at the political agenda. There’s some increase, I think, in the recognition and understanding of where the cold winter deserts are located, why they are important for biodiversity, maintaining ecosystem services, combat desertification a well as for the global climate. Things are developing further with the involvement of more and more scientists and NGOs and that gives me a lot of hope and confidence».
Wunderlich links his love of geography, spatiality and the description of the terrestrial sphere to his childhood: «I was born in East Germany: as a GDR child me and my parents were rather limited to travel abroad. Travelling to the Baltic Sea was something very exciting to me, since the Mediterranean Sea for instance was completely unthinkable to see one day. But traveling to Belarus and Ukraine, the former Soviet Union independent republics, with my parents was extraordinary, something to remember and to boast in school with. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, thanks to my studies in Geography I could start to work beyond these political limitations. That’s how I came to desert environments. So, traveling for me comes from curiosity, interest to discover new things and to do something meaningful for the society and the survival of our planet».
Geography in its critical dimension allows us to bring to local and international knowledge territories that are important for our planet. Not only that, in its being on the borderline with ecology, sociology or the art of diplomacy, it is that interdisciplinary knowledge that can investigate where things happen to then understand their how and why. «That is why I think it is very encouraging to study geography. You can choose which direction to go in», emphasises Wunderlich. The direction of geography today is becoming precisely that of being interrogated by the empty maps of the world and by that nature which has no geopolitical boundaries. In the future, Wunderlich does not exclude that this could also happen through the contamination of geography with art, because «it is not only about hard scientific facts but perhaps also about opening ourselves up to something more». That “something” can be how we represent and orient ourselves in the world.
- The etymology of the term confirms this first fundamental approach to geographical studies: ‘geo-graphia’ derives from two ancient Greek words, ghè, ‘earth’, and graphìa, ‘description, drawing’. ↩︎
- A name proposed in 1858 by C.G. Reuschle (Handbuch der Geographie) to indicate the whole of Europe and Asia and justified by the fact that these two parts of the world, apart from being welded together to appear as a single continental mass, share some essential physical features. ↩︎
- The CADI- Central Asian Deserts Initiative project is part of the IKI- International Climate Initiative. ↩︎
- UNESCO World Heritage Convention. (2023). Cold Winter Deserts of Turan (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan). https://whc.unesco.org/en/decisions/8410. ↩︎
- There is already a long history of scientific ecological research in the region dating back to early times of Soviet Union and even before, as names like Pallas, Przewalski or Humboldt to name only some in many species names indicate ↩︎
- The NIDFF in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, is the first scientific institution worldwide that did scientific ecological research in deserts ↩︎
- 190 CMS signatory countries have also joined the Central Asian Mammals Initiative (CAMI) to protect some 15 mammal species in Central Asia (such as the snow leopard, and the kulan). See CMS. https://www.cms.int/en/legalinstrument/cms. ↩︎
- The IUCN is the official nature advisor to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. The IUCN evaluates sites nominated for the World Heritage List and monitors the conservation status of the listed sites. ↩︎
- IUCN. The World Conservation Unit. (2004). The World Heritage List: Future priorities for a credible and complete list of natural and mixed sites. https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/Rep-2004-026.pdf. ↩︎
