Environmental auditing in rural areas: current patterns and future challenges in Central Asia

Environmental audit (EA) is a systematic process of collecting and objectively evaluating information, whether certain environmental activities are in compliance with audit standards, criteria, and control systems. Due to the former use of the Soviet Union regime, Central Asia, with vast resources and a growing population, is still confronting a number of environmental issues. The increasing number of businesses in Central Asian countries has an impact on the local environment and the population's health. As a response, EA is one of the instruments that businesses may use to improve their environmental performance, protect nature, and ensure public-health safety. This paper, after providing a scoping review concerning the academic literature, investigates, by using secondary data, the current trends and challenges in practical application of EAs in five Central Asian countries. Our findings point out a list of shortcomings in applying the EA tools in Central Asia, which mainly derive from implementation, legislative, and resource gaps. Thus, the road towards a concrete implementation of EA is still far from being achieved. The study ends with some pieces of advice for EA policy makers and opens up avenues for future research, which can also be applied outside Central Asia.