When people walk in public with a snack in hand, they most often litter on the ground in the nearby water, in the bushes, or any place that isn’t a trash can. We like to think to ourselves, “What would changing my habits do for the environment? End climate change?”
Your individual effort may seem insufficient to improve the environment we live in. However, if everyone in the world adopts this mindset, it could have a negative collective environmental impact due to individual choices. This leaves disastrous problems for future generations to address, which will require much more effort to remedy decades of environmental neglect and harmful practices.
This is the case with the Aral Sea, which lies at the geographic and resource junction between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. What was once the world’s fourth-largest lake and a source of fisheries and livelihoods has now shrunk to a vast desert, bringing great ruin to the countries that relied on it. Scientists have called the Aral Sea crisis “one of the most severe ecological disasters on Earth,” underscoring how continued human environmental manipulation has led to its destruction in less than a century.
Jieyin Jiang, an undergraduate student researcher at UC San Diego, explores how the current condition of the Aral Sea cannot be attributed to any single country or policy. Rather, we can look to a series of policies implemented during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union that led to the degradation of the Aral Sea over the course of a century.
This story begins in the 1920s, when the USSR launched massive irrigation projects to boost its cotton production, yielding significant economic gains for the next few decades. The construction of water canals in the 1950s greatly improved irrigation efficiency by drawing water from the Syr Darya, one of the two major inland rivers that supply the Aral Sea. However, canal workers didn’t realize at the time that many poorly built canals actually lost 30-75% of the water they carried. In addition, farmers were unable to control the water supply or accurately predict how much water their fields would need because of cotton’s high water demands, leaving them with surplus water for agriculture after already losing most of the water to seepage and evaporation. This, in turn, led to a decline in freshwater inflow from the Syr Darya into the Aral Sea in the 1960s, marking the first sign of poor water management in the lake.
In the 1960s, Soviet scientist Aleksandr Asarin said that the Aral Sea was “doomed to disappear” from the start as cotton production had devastating impacts on the lake’s shoreline ecosystem. As the lake continued to shrink, a dry seabed known as the Aralkum Desert was formed through severe topsoil erosion of 1.5-2.0 cm. In the 1970s, salt dust storms became common, threatening air quality and the environment for the inland population. Summers were now much warmer on the shores, and winters were noticeably colder. The regional climate shifted toward lower evaporation, humidity, and precipitation, making it difficult to maintain agriculture and the local food supply. The economy was largely sustained by agriculture, and it was much harder to grow cash crops such as cotton while still ensuring sufficient food for the population.
The lake’s initial freshwater inflow of 235 cubic km in 1981 dwindled to 10 cubic km by 1985. Likewise, the lake’s surface area shrank from about 67,500 km² to 39,734 km² by 1990, and by 1995, the lake had lost 75% of its initial water volume. By 2004, the lake’s salinity had risen, severely damaging its internal ecosystem. At the peak of its ecosystem, the Aral Sea supported 20 fish species, but these declined due to agricultural runoff containing pesticides, leading to a collapse of the fisheries. As water became scarce in the region, terrestrial wildlife was also at high risk: 12 mammal species and 11 plant species disappeared, and the habitat for 26 migratory bird species was eliminated.
After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the Soviet Union sought to implement restoration measures by presenting a water-sharing agreement among the five Central Asian republics, but it failed to reach a consensus on how to halt the lake’s rapid shrinkage. In 1992, the Interstate Coordination Water Commission was established to inherit Soviet-era water-allocation quotas. However, once the Central Asian countries became independent states, they faced internal political and economic difficulties that led to the deterioration of water-monitoring facilities, resulting in inadequate management of the lake’s limited water resources.
At the individual level, we can’t foresee how our actions may contribute to large-scale consequences. Similarly, following the collapse of the USSR, independent countries competed for water rights, with downstream nations accusing upstream nations of withholding water. In relation to the Aral Sea, downstream nations are countries that receive the water flow from the Aral Sea later than upstream nations that are located much earlier in the flow of the lake. Upstream nations can thus control the amount of water that flows downstream to other countries farther down the lake’s basin. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan took different approaches to the Aral Sea crisis: Kazakhstan built the Kok Aral Dam, while Uzbekistan took the initiative on cross-border environmental issues. The nations that relied on the Aral Sea entered a “zero-sum game” mentality: each built new dams and reservoirs to secure water for itself and did not consider the future consequences of their actions. The researcher, Jiang, examined the measures undertaken by upstream and downstream nations in response to the degradation of the Aral Sea, using two case studies on Kazakhstan, an upstream nation, and Uzbekistan, a downstream nation. These two case studies allowed her to analyze the situation of the Aral Sea at a smaller scale.
Jiang focused her first case study on how Kazakhstan maintained downstream irrigation and retained more water in the North Aral Sea by building the Kok-Aral Dam in 2005. The construction of this dam in 2005 divided the Aral Sea in North Aral Sea, near Kazakhstan, and the South Aral Sea, near Uzbekistan. This was one of the most effective methods for restoring the lake ecosystem and improving its diversity. Over the next decade, the lake’s volume increased by 42% as it reached 27 cubic km. Since the construction of the dam, the lake’s salinity reduced from 30 g/L to 8 g/L in 2005. This helped bring back the lake’s freshwater habitat. Annual fish production rose from 1,360 tonnes in 2006 to 7,106 tonnes in 2016, boosting the local economy and living standards of the lakeshore population. With more water in the North Aral Sea, more precipitation was observed due to increased evaporation, which improved agricultural land.
Although Kazakhstan implemented necessary measures to improve its water supply in the North Aral Sea, the construction of the Kok-Aral Dam completely cut off the South Aral Sea by preventing the Syr Darya from flowing downstream. The downstream nations were left with the other major inland river, the Amu Darya, which has caused serious environmental and social problems for downstream countries, including Uzbekistan.
Jiang conducted a second case study to investigate the effects of the Kok-Aral Dam on cotton agriculture in Uzbekistan, a downstream nation. Since the USSR’s collapse, 90% of the water has still been used in agriculture, mostly for cotton production. This called for agricultural diversification to improve soil quality and reduce soil depletion from cultivating the same crop, though this transformation has been slow. Because the population lacked an ample water supply, the government allocated some of the water to cultivating food crops for the nation in 2004. In 2010, more water-saving practices were promoted, namely, drip irrigation. This form of irrigation delivers water directly to a plant’s roots through an interconnected network of pipes spread throughout fields. This would help conserve scarce water, as they had learned from previous decades that the Aral Sea crisis was due to water waste from inefficient irrigation.
The Aral Sea crisis was not limited to geographic degradation; it also had devastating consequences for the health and socioeconomic stability of communities that relied on the South Aral Sea. This is because pesticides that were used in agriculture continued to degrade the lakeshore ecosystem. As the lake steadily shrank, it left pesticide-laden soil in its wake, which eroded easily and worsened air quality. This led to a devastating increase in respiratory diseases like bronchitis and asthma among the lakeshore population of Uzbekistan in 2007. The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) released studies showing a decline in birth rates in the South Aral Sea’s lakeshore population in 2009.
The ongoing water shortage has contributed to declines in food security and increases in rural unemployment and poverty, prompting the Uzbek government to adopt a more direct approach to improving living conditions. In 2017, the Cabinet of Ministers approved “The State Programme on Development of the Aral Sea Region for 2017-2021,” which targeted employment, infrastructure, healthcare, housing, and environmental management to ease the growing burdens of lakeshore households. The Uzbek government also pursued multilateral cooperation through the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFAS) (1993), the UN Sustainable Development Summit (2015), and the Committee of Trust Fund meeting (2020). These initiatives recognize that decades of environmental manipulation can be reversed only through the willingness and cooperation of multiple nations, just like individual choices will not end climate change.
The aftermath of the Aral Sea crisis is a reminder that governments should approach science with an open mind and be willing to work with other countries to advance sustainable development. As larger environmental issues intensify, such as climate change and natural resource scarcity, governments should be able to put aside political differences and collectively address these problems. Jiang’s research raises awareness of the foreseeable consequences so that in the 21st century, we are mindful not to repeat the same mistakes, such as those that led to the Aral Sea crisis. By leveraging advances in technology, we can develop more realistic, efficient solutions to looming problems arising from decades of human environmental manipulation. However, it is essential to uphold cooperative governance and prioritize ecological needs to resolve environmental conflicts and protect ecosystems and people.
