Aims Central Asia is one of the most vulnerable and sensitive areas to the change in climate. To understand the response of Central Asia ecosystems to climate change, it is important to improve our understanding of vegetation change and its response to climatic variations. Our objective is to explore and analyze the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and its response to climate change in Central Asia during the period 1982-2012. Methods The linear regression, the empirical orthogonal function (EOF), the singular value decomposition (SVD) and the partial correlation analysis were used to analyze the NDVI change and its response to climate factors in Central Asia during the period of 1982-2012. Important findings 34% of vegetation in Central Asia showed a pronounced change in NDVI with a significant trend of increase (p < 0.05) and the rate of increase in NDVI exceeded 0.004 per year for mountainous regions. Both air temperature and precipitation showed significant effects on NDVI. Based on partial correlation analysis, 63% of vegetation was found to be significantly affected by precipitation (p < 0.05) while 32% vegetation was affected by air temperature (p < 0.05). The NDVI changes showed increasing trend from 1982 to 1994, fluctuations between 1994 and 2002, and increasing trend again from 2002 to 2012 in mountainous and northeastern areas. While the NDVI changes experienced increasing trend from 1982 to 1994 but decreasing trend from 1994 to 2012 in northwestern areas. Based on the analysis of SVD, the spatial patterns of NDVI variations were consistent with the spatial patterns of precipitation variations. However, the temperature responses of vegetation NDVI differed across the northeast and the mountainous regions in Central Asia.