Central Asia’s imperiled water system is one of the most urgent regional issues requiring a rapid response from local governments, businesses, and their international partners.
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The Caspian Sea, vital to Eurasia’s economy and environment, is shrinking at an alarming rate. The declining water level in the sea is one visible consequence of a larger regional water crisis faced by the C5 nations of Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. This water crisis threatens the more than 82 million people who call the largely arid region home, The Caspian Post reports citing Atlantic Council.
A forthcoming Atlantic Council report written by the authors, “Water insecurity in Central Asia: The need for collective action,” explores the global resources that can be mobilized and to what ends they can be quickly directed. This report will provide a practical roadmap that regional and international actors can employ to solve problems in the near and medium terms without massively increasing investments.
Central Asia’s imperiled water system is one of the most urgent regional issues requiring a rapid response from local governments, businesses, and their international partners. Built during the reign of the Soviet Union, the region’s water infrastructure is well past its serviceable life, resulting in up to 40 percent water losses during irrigation and up to 55 percent losses when supplying drinking water. Improving water transit, processing, and irrigation in Central Asia would buy time to allow regional governments to develop sustainable solutions to meet their water needs.
Poor as it may be in water resources and water-supply management, Central Asia is rich in uranium, rare earths, gas, oil, and agricultural commodities. This is also a region that both its powerful neighbors—Russia and China—keep close and often covetous eyes on. The challenges faced by the C5 countries offer opportunities for the United States and the West to get involved and help keep the region from falling into overdependence on either Moscow or Beijing.
The upcoming One Water Summit in Riyadh on December 3, organized by the leaders of France, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, and the World Bank, provides an excellent opportunity for the United States and the West to signal its intention to ramp up engagement with Central Asia on this issue. The summit’s purpose is to expand projects by promoting interstate cooperation between international organizations, local authorities, banks, corporations, charities and nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and civil society. Such engagement could help mitigate the rapidly worsening crisis, make diplomatic inroads in the region, and ensure that the C5 countries are not dependent on Russia and China for their water supply. Western involvement is needed, and it could include greater investment from companies with experience in water-saving agricultural techniques and with track records of successfully standing up modern water storage, channel construction, and treatment projects.
The scale of the crisis
Central Asia’s water resources are severely strained due to climate change, urbanization, industrialization, population growth, and other human activities. The problems are apparent throughout the region, including along the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, in the rapidly drying Aral Sea, in the partially salty Lake Balkhash, and in the Caspian Sea, the largest saltwater body of water on the planet. The region’s upstream countries, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, rely on glaciers in the Pamir and Tian Shan mountain ranges to sustain water flow. However, rising temperatures are causing rapid glacial melting and threatening long-term water availability. Additionally, irregular rainfall patterns are leading to prolonged droughts in some areas and unseasonable floods in others, disrupting agriculture and habitats. The collapse of water management systems after the Soviet Union’s fall worsened the situation, as critical water infrastructure was neglected.
Furthermore, the Aral Sea disaster is one of the most striking examples of water mismanagement. Once the world’s fourth-largest inland sea, the Aral has shrunk by more than 90 percent since the 1960s due to the diversion of its tributaries, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, for large-scale irrigation. While water diversion helped local industries (mainly the cotton industry in Uzbekistan), it has led to severe waterlogging, soil salinization, and a dramatic sea-level drop. This in turn has caused economic problems, disastrous health challenges, and an environmental catastrophe. Today, the Aral Sea is an arid, desert-like region that is failing to support local livelihoods and habitats.
Kazakhstan has made some progress in partially restoring water levels through projects such as the Kok-Aral Dam. Still, Uzbekistan’s continued water diversion for cotton farming makes a full recovery unlikely. The Aral Sea is now fragmented into several lakes, with parts of the body of water irreversibly lost, spreading salt and sand for thousands of square miles, as far as France, Japan, and the Arctic.
In addition, the Caspian Sea coastlines of Kazakhstan and Russia are drying up faster than that of the other bordering countries, Azerbaijan, Iran, and Turkmenistan. This problem is exacerbated by projects that reduce the amount of water that reaches the Caspian and the extraction of water for desalination projects. If the water level of the Caspian Sea is not protected, it will meet the same fate as the Aral Sea. Moreover, the Caspian’s loss will affect the region’s shipping and transportation industry. Currently, the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR), or the Middle Corridor, has become an important transportation artery for goods and commodities (including energy) traveling from Central Asia and China to Europe, bypassing Russian territory. A vital artery of the TITR is the Caspian Sea, with cargo ships and tankers traveling from Aktau, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan, to Baku, Azerbaijan, and vice versa. Decreasing water levels would put heavy ships at greater risk of getting stuck in the shallows and unable to reach ports.
What can be done?
To help address this mounting crisis and deepen ties with Central Asia, the United States should build on existing collaboration with the C5 countries and develop new frameworks focused on the water shortage. The United States has laid the groundwork for greater involvement in the region with the creation in September 2023 of the B5+1, a diplomatic platform for private-sector collaboration between the United States and the C5 states. The United States should use this forum to focus on private-sector initiatives and private-public partnerships that can take concrete steps to alleviate the looming water emergency in Central Asia.
A collaborative approach within the federal government will also be essential to effectively engage with the region on this issue. The US Department of Commerce, in cooperation with the US Chamber of Commerce, the Department of Energy, the Department of State, the Export-Import Bank, the US International Development Finance Corporation, and representatives of industry, should form a task force to discuss regional water project proposals for potential public-private partnerships, management contracts, and financing. Such projects, including drip irrigation, desalination, water utility modernization, and joint water transport system upgrades and management, would aim to make Central Asia more sustainable by saving tens of millions of cubic meters of water per year.
Why act now?
Even though the incoming US administration will not yet be in office when the One Water Summit takes place, the forum is nevertheless an opportunity to begin addressing the grave threat of water insecurity. Water insecurity affects the C5 and other nations with which the incoming Trump administration should seek cooperation. Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev noted that the summit will “drive the momentum on the water agenda,” particularly to save the Caspian Sea, with work to continue into 2025 and beyond. This indicates an appetite among Central Asian leaders for more international cooperation on this issue, which will be vital in mobilizing the necessary global resources and expertise to address the water shortage.
The lack of a secure water supply is an existential threat to Central Asia that can have negative ramifications, including conflicts over water, that could extend far beyond the region. The United States and the West would be wise to have a seat at the table and become involved in helping Central Asia steer a course toward a more stable—and more Western-friendly—future by helping to ensure that the region’s insecurity does not cross the line into outright water starvation. By providing capital and technical knowledge that China and Russia do not possess or have not offered, the United States can help avert a worsening crisis in the region while reducing Central Asian states’ dependencies on Moscow and Beijing.
