Kailash Sacred Landscape
Conservation Initiative

The Kailash Sacred Landscape Conservation Initiative, a collaborative effort of ICIMOD, UNEP, and regional partners in three countries, was initiated through an extensive consultative process, and launched with an Inception Workshop and Regional Consultation held in Kathmandu in July 2009. KSLCI First Regional Workshop was organised from 11th to 13th of April 2010 in Utarakhand, India and Second Regional Workshop was organized  in Jiuzaigou, Sichuan, China from September 4-6, 2010. The Conservation Initiative seeks to facilitate transboundary and ecosystem management approaches for biodiversity conservation and sustainable development through regional cooperation. The proposed Kailash Sacred Landscape (KSL) includes an area of the remote southwestern portion of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) of China, and adjacent parts of northwestern Nepal, and northern India, and encompasses the cultural geography of the greater Mt. Kailash area. This region, famous from ancient times, represents a sacred landscape significant to hundreds of millions of people in Asia, and around the globe. It is an important cultural and religious transboundary landscape with significance to Hindu, Buddhist, Bon Po, Jain, Sikh and other related religious traditions, attracting thousands of pilgrims every year. The KSL comprises the source of four of Asia’s great rivers: the Indus, the Brahmaputra, the Karnali and the Sutleg, which are lifelines for large parts of Asia and the Indian sub-continent. These rivers provide essential transboundary ecosystem goods and services vitally important within the greater Hindu Kush-Himalayan region, and beyond.

This high altitude mountainous region is among the most culturally and ecologically diverse and fragile areas in the world. The KSL is home to a range of endemic flora and fauna important in maintaining both global biodiversity and local livelihoods, including a rich traditional knowledge and a high diversity of medicinal plant resources. This remote and vast area is comprised of a rich and diverse array of biodiversity, ecosystems, biomes, and ecotypes distributed across the extremely rugged and diverse terrain, and a wide variety of indigenous local cultures, languages, and ethnic communities. It provides essential habitat for large numbers of endemic, rare and endangered species, including large mammals like snow leopard, wild ass and antelope. At the same time, this region faces major challenges, including climate and other environmental change processes, globalisation, unsustainable development, increased tourism, and widespread poverty. The KSL Conservation Initiative engages regional, national and local partners and other stakeholders in a consultative process aimed toward the facilitation of a transboundary, integrated approach to sustainable development and conservation in the KSL.