Page "Geography of Uzbekistan" Paragraph 24

The government of Uzbekistan has acknowledged the extent of the country's environmental problems, and it has made a commitment to address them in its Biodiversity Action Plan.

But the governmental structures to deal with these problems remain confused and ill defined.

Old agencies and organizations have been expanded to address these questions, and new ones have been created, resulting in a bureaucratic web of agencies with no generally understood commitment to attack environmental problems directly.

Various nongovernmental and grassroots environmental organizations also have begun to form, some closely tied to the current government and others assuming an opposition stance.

For example, environmental issues were prominent points in the original platform of Birlik, the first major opposition movement to emerge in Uzbekistan.

By the mid-1990s, such issues had become a key concern of all opposition groups and a cause of growing concern among the population as a whole.