Results from informal summit in Kazakhstani capital of Astana

Read the full article in ErasiaNet.

Central Asian leaders recently made agreements that seek to save the shrinking Aral Sea and strive to improve the regional water management system.

According to Eurasian Net,

the agreement on saving the Aral Sea appears to rest on a shaky foundation. The sea -- a victim of misguided Soviet central planners, who diverted rivers that fed the Aral to support cotton cultivation -- has been shrinking at an alarming rate for over 40 years, and now is estimated by the UN Environment Program to be less than half of its size in the mid-1960s. As a first step toward the Aral’s regeneration, the Central Asian leaders agreed to revive the International Aral Sea Salvation Fund, aiming to raise international awareness about the environmental catastrophe.

The second stage of the Aral salvation blueprint would seem to require the diversion of Siberian rivers, an oft-debated measure that was discredited during in the late Soviet era as environmentally hazardous. At a news conference, Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev defended the idea of redirecting rivers, and downplayed the long-standing environmental concerns. "We have talked to the Russian president about the fact that statements to the effect that this would be damaging and so on were populist," Nazarbayev said. "This would be just 8 percent of the flow, which would not even have any effect on drainage but would play a great role in integration and relations between our countries."

Any attempt to implement a river-redirection scheme would be sure to generate a storm of protests. It would also be an enormously expensive project, which, in the end, could merely spread the environmental damage, rather than rescue the Aral. Even while seeming to promote the idea, Nazarbayev admitted that "the issue is quite serious and complex."

Go to this website to see for yourself how much the Aral Sea has shrunk!

I read that the current efforts to improve the situation in the Aral Sea were providing some benefits, and I am glad to see that leaders in the region are still working to reverse one of the worst environmental disasters in the world. Lets hope that they have some success!