Saryarka – Steppe and Lakes of Northern Kazakhstan

Saryarka was inscribed on the World Heritage List on 7 July 2008 and comprises two protected areas in northern Kazakhstan: the Naurzum State Nature Reserve, in Kostanay province, and the Korgalzhyn reserve, in Akmola, with 450,344 hectares in total and a buffer zone of a further 211,147. The Kazakh name saryarka means yellow range.

Its wetlands are of exceptional importance for migratory waterbirds. They lie at the crossing of two great flyways — one between northern Scandinavia and the Far East, the other between the Siberian Arctic and the southern hemisphere — and it is reckoned that between fifteen and sixteen million birds use the site as a feeding ground on their journeys between Africa, Europe and southern Asia and their breeding grounds in Siberia. Among the threatened species that depend on these lakes are the Siberian crane, the Dalmatian pelican and Pallas's fish eagle, and the Korgalzhyn-Tengiz system holds the largest breeding, moulting and staging waterbird populations in Asia, with flamingos as the main draw.

The property also includes more than 200,000 hectares of Central Asian steppe, an ecosystem much reduced since its mass conversion to cropland in the 1950s, which shelters more than half the species of the region's steppe flora and the saiga, the antelope with the prominent snout that suffered a dramatic population collapse and has recovered in recent years. The seasonal dynamics of the lakes, with their cycles of filling and drying, are part of its value.