Ashgabat hosted the 4th National Fulbright Conference focused on environmental protection and ecological development. The forum was organised by the US Embassy to Turkmenistan and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education of Turkmenistan. The conference took its name from the International and Academic Exchange Program founded by Senator James William Fulbright in 1946 to strengthen peace through mutual understanding among the peoples.

The Fulbright Programme occupies a special place among the exchange scholar programmes funded the US Department of State. Over 15 years the Programme has been implemented in Turkmenistan dozens of Turkmen specialists - teachers of the higher educational establishments, foreign-policy experts, mathematicians, healthcare workers, economists and ecologists improved the professional skills in America.

The Ashgabat forum brought together the environmental specialists from Turkmenistan, the United States and the Central Asian states, the participants and alumni of the Fulbright Program and the other academic and scholar programmes funded by the US Government.

The forum participants discussed a broad range of the issues responding to the modern view of the intercultural dialogue on ecological development. As is known Turkmenistan had one of the most extended network of protected territories. Defining the tasks of ensuring ecological security as a priority of the national policy our country consistently pursued the strategy to fulfill these important tasks. In this context the Fulbright Program alumni from Turkmenistan shared the research results on implementation of the national environmental policy. The themes under discussion included assessment of ecological development and environmental conditions in Turkmenistan, ecological NGOs: opportunities and expectations, the ecological and social factors and health of people, etc. The participants were unanimous that the lively exchange of views, experience and information considerably facilitated cultural collaboration, created the effective incentives enhancing the partners’ contribution to the wellbeing of the native country.

The agenda of the two-day conference included the item of establishing the Fulbright Association of Turkmenistan. The foreign experts from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan shared the experience of work and data collection and discussed the organisational issues with their Turkmen counterparts.