Wind farms on the Kazakh steppe, salt-tolerant shrubs on the dried Aral seabed and electric buses on Punjab’s roads point to a shared bet — that cutting carbon and growing an economy need not be opposing goals.
Member countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) are navigating a common challenge: how to sustain economic development and improve living standards while protecting the environment. To address it, they are increasingly working together, sharing technologies and drawing on complementary resources to make green development part of their growth strategies.
That cooperation is taking shape in various ways: wind turbines converting the Kazakh steppe’s strong winds into electricity, salt-tolerant plants taking root on the edge of the shrinking Aral Sea, electric buses running through Punjab’s busy streets, and mountains of waste in Kyrgyzstan being burned to generate power.
Their emerging experience suggests that green development does not have to mean choosing the environment over the economy. These solutions can accelerate the energy transition, create livelihoods and unlock investment and jobs across the region — though, as the Bishkek case below shows, the terms on which such projects are financed matter as much as the technology.
With a combined population of around 42 percent of the world’s total, according to the organisation’s own figures, and economies that continue to grow, SCO countries face rising demand for energy.
Meeting that demand without deepening dependence on high-carbon energy is a major challenge. It is also a significant opportunity.
SCO countries are rich in renewable energy resources, from abundant sunlight and wind to hydropower potential, and are increasingly turning those natural endowments into new sources of energy.
Making that transition work at scale also requires technology and regional cooperation. Sohail Khan, deputy secretary-general of the SCO, has said high-tech products, particularly those produced in China, could help member states implement energy projects and strengthen regional energy connectivity.
According to China’s National Energy Administration, SCO countries had a combined installed renewable energy capacity of about 2,310 gigawatts at the end of 2024 — roughly 14.5 times the level when the organisation was founded in 2001, and about half the world total. That aggregate is dominated by China: the same agency has since put China’s own installed renewable capacity at about 2,340 GW, meaning the figures for the other nine member states are correspondingly small.
Kazakhstan offers one example of how such cooperation can work in practice, and how it can create economic value.
In the Akmola region of northern Kazakhstan, near the capital, Astana, the country’s largest wind power cluster is adding renewable capacity to an electricity system that has long relied heavily on coal. With a combined installed capacity of about 221 megawatts, it was built with Chinese investment and Chinese-made turbines and is run by locally registered project companies.
According to chief engineer Zhang Liang, the cluster generates around 843 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year and avoids nearly 690,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions — roughly equivalent to taking more than 200,000 petrol cars off the road for a year, assuming each travels 15,000 kilometres and consumes 10 litres of fuel per 100 kilometres. The turbine supplier, Windey Energy Technology Group, put the cluster’s annual output at more than 800 million kWh and the emissions saving at about 650,000 tonnes in 2024. Neither figure has been independently verified.
Keeping the turbines running is not always easy. In winter, temperatures in the Akmola region can fall to minus 40 degrees Celsius, while heavy snow increases the risk of ice building up on the blades.
Engineers have adapted the turbines to these conditions, using smoother surfaces to reduce ice formation. A control system also spins the rotors periodically when conditions are safe, using the movement of the blades to shed accumulated ice.
The SCO’s green-development efforts extend well beyond the energy transition, with members also working together on ecological challenges across the region.
The Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest lake, offers one of the region’s most painful reminders of the ecological costs of development.
From the 1960s, the Soviet-era diversion of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers for irrigation — principally for cotton — together with continued heavy water use and a warming climate, dramatically reduced the sea’s size. Its area today is about 10 percent of what it once was, according to NASA, which puts the exposed seabed, now the Aralkum Desert, at about 62,000 square kilometres. Salt left behind on the dried bed has contributed to soil salinisation and alkalisation, and to salt-dust storms. The disaster has become known as the “dry tears of Central Asia.”
Reversing such damage is a long-term task, requiring not only restoration work but also a better understanding of a changing ecosystem. Since 2013, China and Central Asian countries have worked together through the Research Center for Ecology and Environment of Central Asia, an overseas institution of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) led by its Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography in Urumqi. CAS approved a headquarters for the centre in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 2024; it was inaugurated on 19 November 2025.
More than 80 monitoring stations have been established around the Aral Sea to track ecological conditions, surface water and groundwater, and salt-dust storms. Drawing on the data collected, researchers have classified the region into seven ecological types, providing a scientific basis for restoration efforts.
One strand of that cooperation draws on Chinese experience in treating saline-alkali soil, including methods developed in the north-western Chinese region of Xinjiang. Researchers from China and Uzbekistan are testing and selecting plant species that can survive in highly saline soils and may help absorb or reduce salt. As of mid-2026, five experimental halophyte gardens had been established, with two more planned.
At the International Innovation Center for the Aral Sea Basin in Nukus, in Uzbekistan’s Karakalpakstan region, a demonstration zone showcases more than 40 halophyte species studied with Chinese support.
Besides improving soil quality, some of the plants also offer economic opportunities. Bakhitjan Khabibullaev, the centre’s director, pointed to cistanche as one example. The plant has medicinal value and is found in parts of Central Asia, but its potential has not yet been fully explored. China, he said, has developed more systematic research and practical experience in using the plant, offering lessons for Central Asian countries.
The green transition is also reshaping how SCO countries manage their cities, from waste treatment to public transport.
In Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, a waste-to-energy plant is turning a longstanding environmental problem into a source of electricity. Built by China’s Hunan Junxin Environmental Protection Co Ltd, which invested about $95 million, the first phase was inaugurated on 27 December 2025 — the first plant of its kind in Central Asia. It processes around 1,000 tonnes of waste a day and generates about 146 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year.
Construction of the second phase began in June 2026. Once it is complete, the facility is expected to handle up to 3,000 tonnes of waste a day. Bishkek’s city administration says the completed plant will generate around 307 million kilowatt-hours annually — enough to supply roughly 100,000 homes — and cut carbon dioxide emissions by about 312,000 tonnes a year.
The project addresses a problem that had long plagued the city. Before the plant was built, much of Bishkek’s waste was dumped at landfill, where decomposing rubbish generated methane and contributed to the risk of fires.
The arrangement is not costless for the city. Under a 35-year agreement — reported by Eurasianet from contract documents filed on the Chinese disclosure platform cninfo.com.cn — Bishkek pays the operator up to about $17,000 a day, or roughly $6 million a year, to take its waste, while the operator retains the revenue from electricity sales.
The same principle is being applied to urban transport. In Pakistan, where a population of about 259 million, on United Nations projections for 2026, generates enormous demand for daily mobility, cities are under growing pressure to expand transport without worsening air pollution.
The federal government launched the New Energy Vehicle (NEV) Policy 2025–30 in June 2025, setting a target for electric and other new-energy vehicles to account for 30 percent of new vehicle sales by 2030.
Chinese manufacturers are becoming part of that transition. In October 2025, Yutong completed delivery of 400 battery-electric buses — the largest single new-energy bus order in Pakistan to date — which have progressively entered service across 19 cities and districts of Punjab. On 15 August 2026, Beijing Automotive Group announced that its subsidiary Foton Motor had delivered a further 600 electric buses to Pakistan; the company has not said how many are yet in service.
Naveed Arshad, director of the LUMS Energy Institute at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, sees new-energy transport as an emerging opportunity for urban development. As Pakistan’s electricity infrastructure improves, he said, electric vehicles can offer greater energy efficiency and lower operating and maintenance costs. Chinese companies, he added, have technological expertise and experience that can support Pakistan’s development of new-energy transport. Arshad contributed to the drafting of Pakistan’s national electric vehicle policy.
The SCO’s green transition is increasingly becoming a development strategy in its own right. The goal is not simply to cut carbon, but to build a cleaner development model that can strengthen energy supplies, create livelihoods, improve cities and generate new economic opportunities.
When SCO leaders gather in Bishkek on 31 August and 1 September, the focus will be on how to turn these emerging opportunities into deeper cooperation for a greener and more sustainable region.
Editor’s Note: This article was supplied by Chen Ziqi reporter of China Global Television Network (CGTN), a Chinese state broadcaster, and is republished by arrangement. Figures originating with Chinese state agencies or with companies involved in the projects described are attributed as such. Additional reporting, context and verification by The Lahore Times.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Lahore Times.
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