Rabu, 07 Februari 2024
Bayniyazova, 50, has worked the land near Muynak in northeastern Uzbekistan for the most of her adult life. Farming was often challenging, but it was generally consistent and productive. Even as the world around them changed due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the family's farmland continued to produce crops, with water flowing steadily through canals from the Aral and nearby rivers.
Now, Bayniyazova and other inhabitants say they are facing an unstoppable disaster: climate change, which is hastening the decades-long collapse of the Aral, which was once the lifeblood of the hundreds who lived nearby.
The Aral has practically vanished. It was once one of the greatest inland bodies of water in the world, deep blue and teeming with fish. It has shrunk to less than one-quarter of its original size.
Much of its early downfall was caused by faulty human engineering and agricultural ventures, which are currently being compounded by global climate change. Summers are hotter and longer, whereas winters are shorter and extremely cold. Experts and people like Bayniyazova say water is becoming increasingly scarce, with salt levels too high for plants to thrive.
"Everyone goes further in search of water," Bayniyazova explained. "Without water, there's no life."
For decades, the Aral Sea, fed by rivers that rely primarily on glacial melt and running through the landlocked republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, housed meters-long fish harvested and carried across the Soviet Union.
The region thrived, and thousands of migrants from Asia and Europe flocked to the Aral Sea, where opportunities abound in everything from canning factories to luxury holiday destinations.
Today, the few remaining towns sit quietly along the old seabed of the Aral, which is technically classed as a lake due to its lack of a direct exit to the ocean, but locals and officials refer to it as a sea. Dust storms blow over, and rusty ships sit in the desert.
In the 1920s, the Soviet authorities began draining the sea to irrigate cotton and other lucrative crops. By the 1960s, it had shrunk by half, and those crops prospered. By 1987, the Aral had receded to the point where it separated into two bodies of water: the northern and southern seas in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
The United Nations Development Programme describes the devastation of the Aral Sea as "the most staggering disaster of the twentieth century." It blames the Aral's demise for soil degradation and desertification, drinking water shortages, starvation, and declining health.
National governments, international relief organizations, and local groups have all made efforts to conserve the sea, with various degrees of success. Efforts range from planting plants to prevent the advancing dunes to constructing multimillion-dollar dams.
However, experts fear climate change has only accelerated the Aral's demise and will worsen inhabitants' misery.
Without the climate-regulating influence of a huge body of water, dust storms began to blow through settlements. According to the United Nations, they sprayed harmful chemicals from a decommissioned Soviet weapons testing plant and farm fertilizer into locals' lungs and eyes, causing to an upsurge in respiratory ailments and cancer cases.
Fierce winds swept away entire communities, filling abandoned structures with sand. Residents fled. A dozen fish species became extinct, and businesses closed.
Madi Zhasekenov, 64, claimed he witnessed his town's once-diverse population decrease.
"The fish factories closed, the ships were stranded in the harbor, and all of the workers left," said Zhasekenov, former head of the Aral Sea Fisherman Museum in Aralsk, Kazakhstan. "It became only us locals."
Dust storms, rising global temperatures, and wind erosion are killing the glaciers that feed the sea's rivers, according to a United Nations assessment. The remaining water is becoming saltier and evaporates faster.
The paper warns that melting ice and altering river flows may further disrupt drinking water supplies and food security, as well as harm hydropower plants.
During a recent summer in the small desert village of Tastubek, Kazakhstan, farmer Akerke Molzhigitova, 33, observed as the grass her horses ate dried up due to high temperatures. To save them – a key source of revenue and food — she relocated them 200 kilometers (125 miles) away.
Nonetheless, dozens died. Her neighbors, dreading the same outcome, sold their animals.
Adilbay and his buddies fish in the surviving water pockets of the Aral in Uzbekistan, near Sudochye Lake. Their catch is small.
He spreads his arms wide, the size of a fish from long ago. "Now there is nothing," said Adilbay, 62, who uses just one name.
As the water receded, an adjacent fish processing warehouse shuttered. Adilbay's friends and family relocated to Kazakhstan in search of better employment opportunities.
There, fisherman Serzhan Seitbenbetov, 36, and others are successful. He pulled his net while sitting on a boat that was moving gently in the seas. In an hour, he caught a hundred fish measuring about 2 meters (6.5 feet) long. He'll be paid 5000 Kazakhstani Tenge ($10.50), which is five times his prior daily wage as a taxi driver in a neighboring city.
"Now all the villagers make good money being fishermen," he went on to say.
That is the result of Kazakhstan's $86 million dike project, which was completed in 2005 with World Bank financing.
The Kokaral Dam is a dike that runs across a tiny section of sea to save and collect water from the Syr Darya River. The dike exceeded estimates, resulting in a water level increase of more than ten feet after seven months.
According to the World Bank, this helped to recover local fisheries while also affecting the microclimate, resulting in an increase in clouds and rainstorms. Population increased.
However, it was unable to replicate life before the water began to evaporate, according to Sarah Cameron, an associate professor at the University of Maryland who is preparing a book about the Aral.
"It does not support the same amount of people and the fishing industry in the same way," the prime minister added.
And the construction of the dike in Kazakhstan cut off Uzbekistan's southern sea from a vital water source.
Uzbekistan has had less success in rebuilding attempts. The government has not undertaken major projects such as the Kokaral. Instead, the country planted saxaul trees and other drought-tolerant plants to reduce erosion and slow dust storms.
Agriculture, particularly the export of water-intensive cotton, remained a key economic driver. For years, millions of people were compelled to work in the cotton-picking industry, severely depleting water resources.
The discovery of oil and natural gas beneath the Aral's former seabed prompted the construction of gas production facilities, demonstrating Uzbekistan's lack of interest in restoration, according to specialists.
"While there has been some restoration," said Kate Shields, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Rhodes College, "there was a sort of acceptance that... the sea was not coming back."
Government officials in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan did not respond to AP emails regarding restoration efforts, water scarcity, and the effects of climate change.
Bayniyazova's family has excavated an earthen well on her property in Uzbekistan in the hopes of preserving the very little water that remains.
"If there is no water, it will be very difficult for people to live," Bayniyazova stated. "Now people are barely surviving."
She has no plans to leave her farm just yet, but she is aware that more trials are sure to come. Her family would dig deeper wells and have lower harvests. They'll do whatever it takes to maintain the only life they've ever known.
"We'll do everything we can," she replied. "Because what else can we do?"
