KAZAKHSTAN: Engineers And Activists Battle To Save Aral Sea

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Vladimir Akimov

KZYL-ORDA, Kazakhstan, Apr 5 1996 (IPS) - No less than 93 Kazakh and foreign organisations are working on answers to the environmental problems that are shrinking and poisoning the Aral Sea, and not one has so far come up with an effective answer.

“They are compiling voluminous reports, listing developments and sending sporadic humanitarian relief,” said Berdibek Saparbayev, the Akim (administrator) of Kazakhstan’s Kzyl-Orda region.

“Yet they have so far failed to come up with a single project that would help us stop this disaster.”

The Aral Sea disaster continues to get worse and is turning into a global calamity, Saparbayev says. The Aral Sea’s level has fallen by 15 metres in a single generation exposing some 30,000 square kilometres of seabed.

This barren wasteland of salt, sand and silt is whipped up by the region’s regular storms, hurling an estimated 150 million tonnes of ruinous waste over Kzyl-Orda’s precious oases and grazing grounds and as far away, say scientists, as Scandinavia.

“I and my friends used to go fishing along the banks of the mighty Syr Darya which used to flow into the Aral Sea,” says Saparbayev, 43, who was born in bes-Aryk village in Kzyl-Orda.

“Today, a child can now cross that river just about anywhere, it’s so pocked with sand banks. The Syr Darya was once renowned for its abundant fish, but that’s a thing of the past.”

Today only a few local fishermen continue to scratch a living netting grey mullets, imported into the region from the Black Sea 25 years ago.

The inland Aral Sea, in fact a huge lake, was doomed in the 1930s by a vast Soviet irrigation programme that continued up to the 1970s. The then Soviet states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan kept adding more and more dams and irrigation schemes to the rivers and tributaries that fed the Aral Sea, starving it of fresh water.

“The Soviet leadership only came to understand that something was terribly wrong by the late 1980s, when nothing more could be done to hide conceal what was by then an all-out environmental disaster,” says Almabek Nurushev, Executive Director of the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea.

Moscow them moved to establish an Inter-State Council, consisting of Russian, Kazakh and Central Asian delegates. “But the Council failed to accomplish anything for the same reasons that saw its members split from the USSR,” he says.

Kazakhstan was left to cope on its own. Since the break up of the Soviet Union the Kazakh government has revived the Inter-State Council and subsequently founded the International Fund For Saving the Aral Sea.

The Council members all share acute economic problems, and lack funds for a large-scale Aral Sea rehabilitation programme, even if one definitive scheme could be chosen from the thirteen major schemes proposed by the host of groups working alone or in alliance on the sea’s problems. Kzyl-Orda has become a stopping off point for dozens of international organisations reviewing the options.

The World Bank has pledged 62.5 million dollars to the Inter- State Council’s projects, starting with a proposed earthen dam that will seal off the remaining part of the Aral Sea from the marshy wastelands surrounding it, reducing pollution in what is left of its freshwater reserves.

As a follow-up engineers hope to redirect waters from sub-lakes that have been separated from the main sea by falling water levels.

“Surplus drainage waters have accumulated in lowlands, depressions and reservoirs,” says Erkin Sultanbekov, Chairman of the Civilised World International Culture Research Society, “though these waters will have to be cleaned.

He also says Central Asia’s Kara Kum desert has extensive reserves of subterranean water that could be directed to save the Aral Sea.

“These sources, plus normal rainfall and better managed human economic activity, can provide the shrinking Aral Sea with around 40 cubic kilometres of life giving fresh low-mineral water a year,” says Sultanbekov.

“There are ancient dried-river beds and prehistoric terrain depressions scattered all over the region that can make it possible to divert such waters into the Aral Sea,” he says.

“All one has to do is connect them with kyarizes (man-made underground channels to the surface). This kind of subterranean- water collection system has been in existence for many centuries.

“In Iran, which doesn’t have any major rivers or lakes whatsoever, manages with kyarizes to ensure self-sufficiency in water supply.”

But a more urgent problem faces the region. The shrinking water levels have also concentrated levels of toxic chemicals, warns Kazakh public health minister Vasili Devyatko. “As a result,” he adds, “the Aral regional population’s health continues to get worse all the time.

“Doctors have recently discovered highly toxic chlorine-based organic compounds in the milk of young mothers and the number of urolithiasis cases has lately soared 15-fold all over the region.”

The poor quality water supplies have spread water-borne diseases, and the incidence of typhoid fever cases in the region has risen 400 percent. The dust storms are worsening bronchial asthma case rates, which have increased by 139 percent.