Environment - Central Asia - page 453

Environmental Issues
Central Asia's 'empty' landscapes served as testing grounds for So-
viet experiments in taming nature, which resulted in land and water
mismanagement and the destruction of natural habitat on an almost
unimaginable scale.
Even casual students of the region are familiar with some of the
most serious environmental catastrophes: the gradual disappearance
of the Aral Sea and the excessive levels of radiation around the Semey
(Semipalatinsk) nuclear-testing site. Khrushchev's Virgin Lands scheme,
which was planned to boost grain production, resulted in the degrada-
tion of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of Kazakh steppe.
In the economic malaise of the post-Soviet years, the environment has
taken a back seat. Whether it is poaching, hunting tours or pollution
from gold-mining operations, the lure of hard-currency in an otherwise
bleak economic landscape has repeatedly taken priority over nature
conservation.
The extreme continental climate of Central Asia is particularly suscep-
tible to global climate change, and glaciers in the Pamirs and Tian Shan
are already shrinking by around 15m a year.
Water is, in fact, the only major resource in Tajikistan and Kyr-
gyzstan and both countries plan a series of giant hydroelectric dams,
much to the concern of downstream Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, for
whom water supplies are vital to their cotton-based economies. Central
Asia's future is looking increasingly defined by two of nature's greatest
gifts: oil and water.

Search the
website of the
UN environment
Programme
(www.grida.no)
for reports on the
state of Central
Asia's
environment.

The Aral Sea was
once the world's
fourth-largest
lake. It is now
recognised as
the world's worst
man-made
ecological
disaster.

The Aral Sea
The Aral Sea straddles the border between western Uzbekistan and
southern Kazakhstan. It's fed by the Syr-Darya and Amu-Darya rivers,
flowing down from the Tian Shan and Pamir mountain ranges. Back in
the 1950s these rivers brought an average 55 cubic km of water a year to
the Aral Sea, which stretched 400km from end to end and 280km from
side to side, and covered 66,900 sq km. The sea had, by all accounts,
lovely clear water, pristine beaches, enough fish to support a big fishing
industry in the ports of Moynaq and Aralsk, and even passenger ferries
crossing it from north to south.
Then the USSR's central planners decided to boost cotton production
in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, to feed a leap forward in
the Soviet textile industry. But the thirsty new cotton fields, many of
them on poorer desert soils and fed by long, unlined canals open to the
sun, required much more water per hectare than the old ones. The ir-
rigated area grew by 20% between 1960 and 1980, but the annual water
take from the rivers doubled from 45 to 90 cubic km. By the 1980s the
annual flow into the Aral Sea was less than a tenth of the 1950s supply.
Production of cotton rose, but the Aral Sea sank. Between 1966 and
1993 its level fell by more than 16m and its eastern and southern shores
receded by up to 80km. In 1987 the Aral divided into a smaller northern
sea and a larger southern one, each fed, sometimes, by one of the rivers.
The two main fishing ports, Aralsk (Kazakhstan) in the north and
Moynaq (Uzbekistan) in the south, were left high and dry when efforts to
keep their navigation channels open were abandoned in the early 1980s.
Of the 60,000 people who used to live off the Aral fishing industry (har-
vesting 20,000 tons of fish a year), almost all are gone. These days the
rusting hulks of beached fishing boats lie scattered dozens of kilometres
from the nearest water. Of the 173 animal species that used to live around
the Aral Sea, only 38 survive.

The best places
to view the Aral
disaster are Moy-
naq in Uzbekistan
and Aralsk in Ka-
zakhstan. Aralsk
is closer to the
actual sea (you
can swim!) but
Moynaq has more
fishing trawlers
rusting in the
salty desert.