Despite its name, the Aral Sea, or rather former Aral Sea, is geographically a lake. It was once the fourth largest lake in the world, but, over the past decades, climate change and human activity have led to its gradual shrinking.
1. The former Aral Sea
Located on the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the once great lake has shrunk so much it has separated in smaller basins. The term “former Aral Sea” is used to differentiate between the area the lake once covered and the now “North Aral Sea” and “South Aral Sea”, which, in its turn, has further split into eastern and western lobes that remained, for a while, tenuously connected at both ends, until their eventual separation and ultimately complete disappearance of the eastern lobe.
The shrinkage started in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union implemented a major water diversion project to irrigate the arid plains of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The project involved taking water from the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers, the two major rivers in the region and water supply of the Aral Sea, and using it to transform desert land into mainly cotton farms.
Although irrigation made the desert bloom, it devastated the water basin. Moreover, besides being diverted due to the irrigation scheme, the two rivers have been running drier and drier due to climate change. Fed by snowmelt and precipitation in faraway mountains, global warming has greatly reduced the rivers’ sources, thus further decreasing the flow into the sea. Some estimates suggest that the lake is now just 10% of its original size.
2. A new desert
Ironically, although taking water from the rivers was supposed to turn desert into farmland, a whole new desert has formed on the area of the dried–up bed of the Aral Sea – the Aralkum. According to the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFAS), the Aralkum Desert now extends over 54,000 km2, or about the size of Croatia.
With the little inflow of fresh water, the sea has also salinized over the years. Moreover, the increasingly salty water has become polluted with fertilizer and pesticides. About 100 million tonnes of salty dust from the Aralkum, contaminated with agricultural chemicals, blowing hundreds of kilometres away, has become a public health hazard.
The salt carried by the wind in the region is also degrading the soil and crops have to be flushed with larger and larger volumes of river water, further exacerbating the problem. Former sea fisheries, and the communities depending on them, have collapsed, infant mortality has increased in the region, while the loss of the moderating influence of such a large body of water has made winters colder and summers hotter and drier.
3. The International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea
The International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea was established in 1993 by the presidents of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to overcome the region’s environmental crisis and improve the socioeconomic situation in the Aral Sea basin. The members hold chairmanship of the fund on a rotating basis and, from 2024 to 2026, Kazakhstan takes the lead.
“The Aral Sea Basin Program-4 (ASBP-4) (…) was envisaged to develop a regional action plan for adaptation to climate change and, thanks to the support of the Program of the German Society for International Cooperation GIZ “Green Central Asia”, five of our countries have developed and adopted a Regional Strategy for Adaptation to Climate Change in Central Asia”, explained Askhat Orazbay, Chairperson of the IFAS Executive Committee.
During its chairmanship, Kazakhstan will focus on the creation of a long-term and sustainable regional cooperation mechanism for the effective use of water and energy resources in Central Asia, taking into account the interests of all countries in the region in the fields of irrigation, hydropower and ecology. The country is also working on joining the World Health Organization’s Protocol on Water and Health to the Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes, which Uzbekistan has already joined.
As for actions on the ground, Orazbay said that IFAS is working on disseminating climate-adapted agricultural practices, implementing measures to preserve and restore ecosystems in the basins of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya rivers and the forestation of the dried Aral Sea bed.
