HISTORY OF THE ARAL SEA CRISIS
Overview
In the first half of the twentieth century, the Aral Sea was the fourth largest lake on earth. The Aral was fed by two rivers – the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. The sea's fate was entirely dependent on the management of these inflows, especially the Amu Darya – a much larger river than its northern twin. The Soviet and post-Soviet mismanagement of the Amu Darya has played the leading role in the contemporary Aral Sea Crisis, during which the Aral Sea shrunk by 90%, and its seafloor became the world's youngest desert.
Soviet history
By the end of 1922, the combined catastrophes of the First World War, revolution, revolt and civil war had left Central Asia in ruins. The regional agricultural systems were devastated. Over the coming decades, the new Soviet government created increasingly intense irrigation networks along the Amu Darya. This was part of Stalin's ‘Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature’ – a Soviet scheme to impose a cotton monoculture on the deserts of the Aral Sea Basin. A vast amount of the Amu Darya's water was redirected through extensive canal networks. After Stalin's death in 1953, this irrigation network continued to grow at an even faster rate, and the downstream Aral Sea began to receive less and less water.
In 1954, the USSR began its largest project on the Amu Darya – the Karakum Canal. This canal was conceived as a waterway between the Amu Darya and the Caspian Sea, however this goal proved unobtainable. Construction on the Karakum Canal ended in 1988, before the waterway reached its intended destination. Even so, the Karakum Canal is one of the largest irrigation canals on earth, running over 1000 kilometers through the Karakum Desert and diverting around 13 cubic kilometres of water away from the Amu Darya each year. Leakage and evaporation plague the canal, with the result that as much as 70% of the Amu Darya's water disappears into the sands of the surrounding desert (UNDP, 2009).
By 1991, the Soviets had built thousands of kilometers of canals along the Amu Darya. The river stopped feeding the Aral Sea. Without its inflow, the Aral Sea rapidly shrunk to a tenth of its former size. Soviet engineers were well aware of the ecological fallout. A former Soviet official told the New York Times in 2002 that: “it was part of the five-year plans, approved by the council of ministers and the Politburo. Nobody on a lower level would dare to say a word contradicting those plans, even if it was the fate of the Aral Sea” (Makuch, 2012).
Post-Independence History
The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, but its irrigation schemes persisted under the new leader of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov. His government continued to rely on the cotton monoculture that had grown along the Amu Darya. The Aral Sea Crisis exacerbated, the former Aral seafloor became the world's youngest desert. The newly exposed sands started to be picked up by toxic dust storms that blow across Central Asia.
Reform Under Mirziyoyev
President Mirziyoyev’s assumption of power in late 2016 was accompanied by a frenzy of progressive reforms. The new government has directed far more attention towards the Aral Sea Crisis than any previous one. In September 2019, Mirziyoyev championed the idea of transforming the Aral Sea region into a zone of ecological innovations and technologies. His proposition was enacted by the UN General Assembly in 2021. Many organisations in the region are now working to combat the desertification on the former Aral seabed. Others are working to promote more sustainable water practices along the Amu Darya – to protect the left of water that
In the last few years, an increasingly global network of donors has directed funds to mitigate the Aral Sea Crisis. As of December 2022, the UN Multi-Partner Human Security Trust Fund for the Aral Sea has raised over $16 million. This international fund was created in 2018, and works to support the communities affected by the ecological fallout of the Aral Sea Crisis. Mirziyoyev has also lifted many restrictions of data, and thus enabled more research to be undertaken in the Aral Sea Region. Notably, the first socio-economic survey of communities living in the Aral Sea region was conducted by the UN in 2017.
Today the sea is gone, but its people remain. And while the road is long, their future is beginning to look more hopeful, as more funding, research, and policy is directed to address the ongoing Aral Sea Crisis, and protecting what is left of the Amu Darya river.
Sources
Makuch, B. (2012). Ghost Lake: The Aral Sea Disaster. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/avnjm5/ghost-lake-the-aral-sea-disaster.
Peterson, M. K. (2019). Pipe Dreams: Water and Empire in Central Asia’s Aral Sea Basin. Cambridge University Press.
UNDP (2009). UZBEKISTAN: Improving Irrigation Efficiency and Lowering Energy Consumption. UNDP. https://sgp.undp.org/case-studies-189/528-sgp-uzbekistan-improving-irrigation-efficiency-and-lowering-energy-consumption/file.html.