Aral Sea: an environmental disaster in twentieth century in Central Asia
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Aral Sea: an environmental disaster in twentieth century in Central Asia Najibullah Loodin1,2,3,4 Received: 4 April 2020 / Accepted: 29 May 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract The Aral Sea catastrophe profoundly worsened the socio-economic, environmental and health conditions of the local communities in Central Asia. This research paper is based on quantitative approach. The three indicators of climate change temperature, relative humidity and precipitation were used to assess if climate change was one of the main contributors to the shrinkage of Aral Sea. The initial data were retrieved from Global Weather Data SWAT. The paper has analyzed the aforementioned indicators of climate change from January 01st, 1979 to July 05th, 2014 using Hydrologic Engineering Center-Hydrologic Modeling System model. The paper has found out that the discharge of Amu Darya River Basin at the inlet of Aral Sea Basin in Karakalpakstan, an autonomous Republic located in Uzbekistan, has sharply declined. A maximum peak flow happened at the inlet of Aral Sea in Karakalpakstan on May 25th, 1988. Since then, the inflow at the Aral Sea Basin in Karakalpakstan was sharply declined due to the drastic climate change in the region. The author believes that the outcome of the research paper will support policy makers of Central Asian states as well as other stakeholders to take measurable steps in addressing the issue of Aral Sea crisis. Keywords Environment · Aral Sea · Soviet Union · Cotton production · Irrigation · HEC-HMS
Introduction Central Asia is geographically surrounded by desert, semidesert, dry steppes and high mountains. Aral Sea Basin entails the Turan Lowland-the Kara-Kum, Kyzyl-Kum and Muyun-Kum deserts—and is bordered by the Kazakh Hills and Tian Shan-Pamir mountains in the north and in the south, respectively. Aral Sea is fed by Syr Darya River and Amu Darya River from north and south, respectively. Both of the rivers are fed by glaciated Tian Shan and Pamir Mountains that finally flow into the Aral Sea (Lioubimtseva 2013). The use of old irrigation schemes for the expansion * Najibullah Loodin [email protected] 1
Water Cooperation and Diplomacy, UN Mandated University for Peace, San José, Costa Rica
2
Present Address: UNESCO-IHE (Institute for Water Education), Van Hassetlaan 69, 2625 HD Delft, The Netherlands
3
Oregon State University, Corvallis, USA
4
Herat University, Engineering Faculty, Civil Engineering Department, Bagh‑e Azadi Street, Herat, Afghanistan
of agricultural productivity, specifically cotton cultivation, in an unsustainable way has disrupted the hydrological cycle of Aral Sea. Considering the drastic climate change along with irrational use of water for the production of cotton in Uzbekistan, the discharge of Amu Darya River Basin into Aral Sea has significantly decreased. For example, between 1995 and 1997, the average discharge of Amu Darya River into Aral Sea was almost 2.6 km3 which was significantly lower than 10 km3 in 1990 (Shi et al. 2014). Key c
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