Kazakhstan says part of the Aral Sea has almost doubled in volume January 14, 2025

Kazakhstan says part of the Aral Sea has almost doubled in volume / Photo: © AFP.

By AFP - Agence France Presse

Kazakhstan says part of the Aral Sea has almost doubled in volume

Kazakhstan said on Monday that the northern part of the Aral Sea has nearly doubled in volume since 2008, a rare environmental success story in a region plagued by pollution.

The Aral Sea, between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, was once the world's fourth-largest lake before Soviet irrigation projects caused most of it to dry up.

The transformation of the freshwater sea, which was once 40 meters deep and stretched over 68,000 square kilometers, was considered one of the world's worst environmental catastrophes.

Since 2008, the volume of water in the northern and smaller parts of the sea “has increased by 42% and reached 27 billion cubic meters (950 billion cubic feet),” reported the Central Asian Republic's water resources ministry.

This was “thanks to the implementation of Phase One of the Aral Sea (North) conservation project,” the ministry told AFP.

The scheme, jointly funded by the Kazakh government and the World Bank, involved building new infrastructure to prevent water from flowing out of the sea.

In 2024 alone, the authorities directed 2.6 billion cubic meters of water from the Syr Darya River to the northern part, reducing the salinity of the water by a factor of almost four and promoting aquatic life, he said.

Efforts to save the Aral Sea required close cooperation between the five former Soviet republics of Central Asia, which set annual water quotas for the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, the two rivers that feed the Aral.

During the Soviet Union's rule, the rivers were diverted for use in agriculture, mainly to grow cotton and rice, causing the sea to shrink by up to 90% in size between the 1960s and 2010s.

By the end of the 1980s, the sea had split into two sections: a larger one on the Uzbek side, which has mostly dried up, and a smaller one on the northern Kazakh side, which has become the focus of conservation efforts.

The drying up of the Aral Sea has caused the extinction of several species of animal and virtually ended human activity in the area.

In addition, the winds have carried tens of millions of tons of salt and toxic dust from the dry lake bed throughout Central Asia, causing cancer and respiratory diseases.

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