The Aral Sea Crisis

 

source: K.J. Pakenham: Making Connections

 

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For many decades, environmental scientists have been warning us that immense damage can be caused to the ecology of a given region by pressure for economic development and by apparently reasonable, but in reality short-sighted, responses to this  pressure. The damage will not only negate any economic progress the region might have experienced but also has the potential to make the region unlivable. The story of the Aral Sea, described in an article in Environment magazine by V. M. Kotlyakov, a Soviet geographer, is a clear example of the damage that poorly  planned human economic activity can have on the environ­ment.

 

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The Aral Sea is located in a semi-arid region of south-central Asia, close to the former Soviet republics of Karakalpakia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenia, and Tajikistan (see Figure 1).  As recently as the 1950s, the sea covered an area of sixty-six thousand square kilometers, with a mean depth of sixteen meters. Its waters were fresh, with a mean salinity (salt content) of 1 percent to  1.1  percent.  Two large rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr

 Darya, flow into the sea. The water from the two rivers, plus the annual rainfall, maintained the volume and level of water in the sea.

 

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By 1990, however, the Aral Sea had shrunk to about 55 per­cent of its original area and had become two separate lakes; its total water volume had dropped to less than one-third of its 1950s volume. The salt content of the sea, on the other hand, had in-creased by almost 300 percent.

 

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The root cause of these massive changes in the physical character of the Aral Sea was the decision, made in the late 1950s, to develop agriculture by using water from the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya rivers for irrigation. Since the early 1960s, the area of irrigated agricultural land has expanded rapidly, an expansion that has reduced the flow of water into the Aral Sea to approx-imately 13 percent of its pre-1960 total.

 

 

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The consequences of this reduction in water flow have been catastrophic for the area surrounding the Aral Sea. Whole species of fish have died out, and commercial fishing, which used to be a productive economic activity, has practically stopped. Without the moderating influence of the vast expanse of the origi­nal sea, the climate of the territory within one hundred to two hundred kilometers of the sea has become more extreme. Rainfall has decreased, while summers have become shorter and warmer. As a result, there are no longer enough frost-free days in the year for growing cotton, once the main crop of the Amu Darya delta. In addition, as the water level has dropped, the forests on either side of the Amu Darya river have dried up, causing the loss of about half of the region's bird and mammal species. Another problem is that salt from the exposed sea bed is spread by storms on the sur­rounding land, increasing its salt content and reducing its fertility.

 

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The impact of recent attempts at economic development

 on the ecology of the region, however, is not restricted to the consequences of the falling water levels in the Aral Sea and its two main rivers. Inefficient methods of irrigation allow much of the water to evaporate, causing crop-damaging salts to accumu-late in the soil. Then farmers use more water to wash these salts out of the soil; the salts enter into the rivers where they ultimately increase the salinization of areas downstream and the Aral Sea itself. Other agricultural practices in the irrigated land include the extensive use of artificial fertilizers and chemical pesticides to sup­port production of the two main crops, rice and cotton. As a result, the water that ultimately drains back into the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya from the fields also carries high concentrations of phos-phates and nitrates, as well as chemical pesticides.

 

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The accumulation of these toxic chemicals in the rivers is now contaminating local supplies of drinking water. As a result, in the years since 1975, people living in the area have begun to suffer increasingly from a number of serious health problems. As is often the case with environmentally linked illness, infants and children are the most vulnerable. In the city of Karalpakia, for example, the 1989 mortality rate for children was among the highest in the

 world.

 

 

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In 1990, a conference of international scientists met to consider "the Aral crisis." The scientists concluded that the Aral re­gion was already an ecological disaster area and that massive changes in agricultural policy and practices were urgently needed to reverse the process of environmental destruction. If such measures were not taken without delay, the Aral basin would become a wasteland, incapable of supporting the human settlements and activities it once supported.

 

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The case of the Aral Sea and its basin is not unique; it is so merely one

example of the process of anthropogenic desertification, the conversion of agricultural land to desert by environmen­tally destructive human activities. This is a global problem. Indeed the United Nations Environment Program estimates that about 60 percent of all agricultural land in drier regions may be affected to some degree by desertification. Salinization, for example, threatens 20 percent of all irrigated land in the United States. The Aral crisis, therefore, offers a clear warning of the dangers of poorly planned economic development. It also offers an opportunity to gather information needed in the search for solutions and alternative models of economic development.