0
0
This is Part 1 of a two-part series looking at the Aral Sea recovery projects and the future of the Amu Darya watershed in Uzbekistan. Part two will be released next week.
The shrinking of the world’s third-largest lake to less than a tenth of its original size has been called the world’s worst human-caused environmental disaster. And while Central Asia’s Aral Sea is generally considered to have become a disaster and “shrunk” by about 1986, nearly 40 years later the effects are still unfolding.
And what’s more, they are all but certain to keep unfolding for another 40 years, as a mixture of geopolitical negotiations and shrinking glaciers threatens to turn a once prosperous section of the Silk Road into the most water-stressed area on Earth.
The International Fund to Save the Aral Sea, (IFAS) a government-funded and partly government-staffed agency divided between the five countries whose water or weather was affected by the Aral Sea disaster, admitted to WaL that there is no chance to reverse the sea’s disappearance—the sands across which it once flowed having lost the properties for retaining water.
Instead, their work centers around ameliorating the disaster’s public health, economic, and environmental effects while creating the conditions for a whole new terrestrial ecosystem to basically terraform the area.
To understand the scope of the challenge, terraforming is sometimes theorized as a way to make Mars habitable again. Accordingly, ‘de novo-wilding’ of the Aral Desert would be the greatest achievement in environmental engineering if it could reverse the ecological decline across an area the size of South Carolina.
“It’s very clear that there’s no chance to bring back the Aral Sea,” Alauatdin Mambetkarimov, Director of the Nukus Branch of IFAS, told WaL. “The aim of the Fund is to mitigate the problems—ecological, economic—of the Aral Sea region’s people”.
“The Fund can’t solve 100% of this problem. That’s why we use the power of neighboring countries. It’s not just this region’s problem, but it’s also the whole world’s problem”.
Then and now
The story of the Aral Sea began when the Soviet Union began turning the agricultural land along the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers which run primarily through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan into cotton plantations in the early 1950s. Supplying the vast majority of the cotton for the USSR, Uzbekistan diverted enormous amounts of water from the river to quench the thirsty plants growing in an arid environment.
Over the next 30 years, this caused the Aral Sea to separate into several large lakes, which one by one dried up. As the waters vanished and the salinity increased, dozens of fish species once harvested for a flourishing canning industry went extinct, and the salt left behind from the receding waters began to spread for hundreds of kilometers across the region, ruining subsistence farming and causing a variety of health problems among the residents of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan, including kidney disease/failure, and blindness.
As the seabed baked in the summer sun, which can reach 50°C, gases once contained by the mud on the seafloor were released into the area, causing further disease outbreaks. Rampant pesticide and herbicide use, continuing until recently, contaminated the river and the sea with chemicals and heavy metals, worsening the public health crisis. A clandestine dump for radioactive waste constructed on an island in the Aral by Russia added yet more to the burden, until towns like Moynaq had the highest child and infant mortality rates on Earth.
Gradually, the area became known as the Aralkum, or “Aral Sands”—Earth’s newest desert.
As Uzbekistan entered the 21st century, and the sea continued to shrink, efforts were made to contain both the sands and the salt from spreading, resulting in the earliest clean-up/mitigation efforts by IFAS.
IFAS, the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Uzbekistan, and the State Forestry Committee selected various desert-dwelling plants and began seeding areas around and in the former sea. Over 1,500 tons of sauxal seed were spread across almost 4,500 square kilometers of seabed. 8 million saxaul plants and another 8 million tamarisk, and local species like Kandym, a type of buckwheat, were planted by hand.
An artificial desert
Visiting the Aralkum today, it’s difficult to imagine it once being a seafloor—it looks so much like so many other deserts in the world, and environmental monitoring has shown that wildlife are beginning to colonize the new desert, particularly along its outskirts near the southern water bodies at the Amu Darya delta.
These include the caracal, a type of wild cat, as well as the endangered kulan, a type of wild ass. Jackals, jerboas, Tolai hares, and over 30 species of waterbirds inhabit these semi-natural, highly anthropologically-influenced landscapes.
Currently, the size of the newly forested areas exceeds 1.7 million hectares. Saxaul, tamarisk, and other salt-tolerant plants prevent harmful salts and dust particles from being stirred up into the air, information from the Uzbekistan embassy in Germany claims. The plants remove excess salt from the soil and make it usable for farmers.
“Every hectare that is harvested from the desert is the result of the work of hundreds of people, from scientists to ordinary citizens, who travel from all over Uzbekistan to take part in the campaign,” the embassy wrote.
Future projects that IFAS is working to complete will be a network of small water bodies at the delta of the Amu Darya, where artisanal fishermen still live and work.
“We don’t have the geographic situation as Kazakhstan, but we do have this system of lakes being built for the Moynaq District. We stopped the salt winds from affecting the cities of Karakalpakstan,” said Mambetkarimov.
“The work is not stopped, and the government has spent money to continue developing this system of lakes. 50% of the lakes are filled and finished, and we’re trying to get international experts to come and see if there could be more. It depends on the water in the Amu Darya and whether more [lakes] would be a benefit for the people”.
The lakes will be connected via a series of spillways and drainage canals to effectively manage the water flows in times of drought. There are 22 such construction projects, and 2 have been completed. WaL.
We Humbly Ask For Your Support—Follow the link here to see all the ways, monetary and non-monetary.
PICTURED ABOVE: The line of old fishing boats at Moynaq which have become an icon of ‘disaster tourism’. PC: Andrew Corbley ©
