Uzbekistan has one of the youngest populations in its region – and a generation increasingly conscious that it will inherit some of Central Asia’s most severe environmental challenges. From biodegradable plant pots to clean-water projects in Karakalpakstan, young Uzbeks are turning climate anxiety into action.

In 2026, Uzbekistan completed its first national census since independence. The preliminary results revealed a population of 39,047,321 – 810,617 more people than previous official estimates had suggested.

They also underscored just how young the country is. The largest age group is children under five, numbering around 4.6 million, while the median age is just 29.5 years.

That demographic profile represents both an opportunity and a challenge. Today’s children and young adults will drive Uzbekistan’s future economy, shape its cities and institutions, and place growing demands on resources. They will also inherit a country already confronting water scarcity, desertification, extreme heat and the long environmental legacy of the Aral Sea disaster.

Read more on Novastan: From the Pamirs to the Aral Sea: Following the Amu Darya Through Central Asia

Many are acutely aware of what lies ahead.

A 2022 UNDP study on climate awareness among young people in Uzbekistan found that 92% of respondents were either deeply or somewhat concerned about climate change. Water scarcity, health risks and desertification ranked among their major concerns.

Increasingly, some young Uzbeks are moving beyond concern towards practical action.

From climate concern to climate action

One attempt to channel that engagement is the Youth Climate Actions Network, which brings together young environmental activists from Central Asia as well as Azerbaijan, Türkiye and Hungary.

Supported by partners including Uzbekistan’s National Committee on Ecology and Climate Change, UNICEF and the Zamin Foundation, the initiative combines environmental education with leadership and advocacy training.

This year’s 52 Climate Champions were selected through an open call by Eco-Schools. Participants attended training, represented Uzbekistan at events including the Regional Environmental Summit in Astana, the International Youth Forum in Istanbul and the Eco Expo in Samarkand, and organised activities in communities across Uzbekistan.

According to programme figures, the participants have trained more than 17,000 of their peers, planted around 1,900 trees, collected more than 18 tonnes of waste for recycling and organised Eco Festivals in hundreds of schools.

At the Eco Expo in Samarkand in June, the scale of youth involvement was difficult to miss.

Green University students acted as ambassadors for their academic programmes. Teenagers Kamila and Veronica represented UNICEF and spoke about their UniSat project, which involved launching satellites over the Aral Sea. Other young activists put their language skills and local knowledge to use with international delegations, drawing attention to environmental initiatives from regions such as Syrdarya which might otherwise struggle for visibility.

But some of the most interesting projects were found in the Start-up Hall, where young entrepreneurs were attempting to turn environmental problems into viable businesses.

Turning environmental problems into businesses

Rayhona represented Organic Living, a Tashkent-based brand producing alternatives to plastic-heavy and chemical-intensive household products.

“We care about nature, we care about our health, and that’s why people who love a healthy lifestyle and nature choose us,” she explained.

The company produces items including soap made from coconut oil and detergent sheets designed to replace conventional washing detergents and their plastic packaging.

Organic Living’s products are already sold in shops in Tashkent and online. Its premise is simple: environmental awareness can create consumer demand, and that demand can make greener alternatives commercially viable.

For Shakhida Karlibayeva and Miyratdin Azhiniyazov, the problem they wanted to address was rooted much closer to home.

The two co-founders of ECOPOTS come from Karakalpakstan, where large-scale planting programmes are being used to stabilise soils and establish vegetation on and around the exposed seabed of the former Aral Sea.

Tree planting creates an environmental paradox of its own. Seedlings are frequently raised and transported in single-use plastic pots, which can then become waste in a region where recycling infrastructure remains limited.

ECOPOTS offers an alternative. Karlibayeva and Azhiniyazov produce plant pots from wool and other natural ingredients. Seedlings can be planted directly into the ground without removing the container, reducing root disturbance while allowing the pot itself to biodegrade.

Such enterprises show how environmental problems can generate opportunities for innovation. But Uzbekistan’s ecological challenges extend far beyond problems that consumer choice or a successful start-up can solve.

Read more on Novastan: “My Childhood Was Spent on the Shore of a Sea That No Longer Exists”

For young activists from Karakalpakstan in particular, environmental action can mean confronting problems rooted in decades of ecological degradation.

Living with the Aral Sea crisis

“In Karakalpakstan, the drinking water crisis is inseparable from the legacy of the Aral Sea,” says Gulnaz Jagiderova, a former Youth Climate Action Consultant for UNICEF who recently completed an MA in Social Change, Environment and Sustainability as a Chevening Scholar at the University of Manchester.

For Jagiderova, the growth of youth environmental initiatives across Uzbekistan offers grounds for optimism – but not an excuse to underestimate the scale of the challenge.

“What gives me hope is the scale of youth-led climate and environmental action emerging across Uzbekistan,” she says.

“The challenges remain systemic and long-term. But when young people in frontline regions move from awareness to implementation, organising, innovating, and holding institutions accountable, solutions become grounded in lived reality.”

Few initiatives demonstrate that transition from awareness to implementation as directly as the work of another young environmental activist, Gulnaz Abutova.

Abutova divides her time between Nukus and Tashkent and is the founder of Clean Water, a non-profit organisation installing small-scale water treatment stations in villages in the Aral Sea region.

Each station can provide safe drinking water for up to 2,000 people and costs around UZS 120 million – slightly more than US$10,000 – to install.

“Clean water work is deeply personal to me because it turns a simple idea into tangible change,” Abutova says.

“Seeing this direct impact reminds me that meaningful change begins with taking action.”

The work requires not just environmental expertise but fundraising, logistics and cooperation with communities. Clean Water has so far installed stations serving ten villages, with plans for another five.

Abutova combines the voluntary initiative with her work at the Aral School, an ecological education programme commissioned by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation.

Her experience illustrates both the possibilities and the limitations of youth-led environmental action. A purification station can transform daily life in a village. Scaling that impact across an entire region facing structural water insecurity is a far larger task.

A generation willing to act

None of the young people I met appeared under any illusion about the scale of Uzbekistan’s environmental challenges.

Climate change intersects with problems that have accumulated over decades: the degradation of the Aral Sea basin, pressure on increasingly scarce water resources, waste management, desertification and the need to reconcile economic growth with environmental sustainability.

Youth programmes, social enterprises and local initiatives cannot resolve these problems alone. Nor should responsibility for tackling them be transferred onto a generation that did not create them. Large-scale change will ultimately depend on public policy, investment, infrastructure and cooperation between Uzbekistan and its neighbours.

But the growing involvement of young people matters.

Some are lobbying and educating their peers. Others are developing products, planting trees, launching environmental businesses or finding practical ways to bring clean water to communities. Their projects differ dramatically in scale, but they share a conviction that environmental problems are not simply something to be endured.

Uzbekistan’s young population will live longest with the consequences of the decisions being made today. Increasingly, its members are also demanding a role in shaping what happens next.

By Sophie Ibbotson, Uzbekistan’s Ambassador for Ecology.

The post From the Aral Sea to eco start-ups: Uzbekistan’s young climate generation appeared first on Novastan English.

Thousands of kilometres before rusting fishing boats appear in the sands of Muynak, the Amu Darya begins as mountain water.

Its headwaters descend from the Pamirs and northern Hindu Kush through the Panj and Vakhsh river systems. The Panj marks much of the Afghan-Tajik border before meeting the Vakhsh; downstream of their confluence, the river takes the name Amu Darya.

From there, it leaves the mountains and enters an entirely different world of deserts, irrigated plains, ancient cities and modern international frontiers.

For centuries, the Amu Darya – the Oxus of antiquity – has helped determine where people could settle and where political power could flourish. Irrigation drawn from its waters sustained some of Central Asia’s great civilizations. Changes in its channels could nourish one settlement while depriving another of water. In the twentieth century, Soviet planners attempted to engineer the river on a vastly greater scale.

Read more on Novastan: The Caspian Sea Is Retreating. Central Asia Is Not Ready

Following it today from the mountains towards the Aral Sea means travelling through many of the defining questions facing contemporary Central Asia: hydropower and climate resilience, Afghanistan’s growing use of the river, cross-border trade, irrigation, agricultural dependence and the ecological legacy of the Aral disaster.

The river changes character repeatedly along the way.

In the mountains it is born. Along the Panj it becomes a frontier. On the Vakhsh it becomes electricity. At Termez it both divides and connects Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. In Khorezm it becomes the hidden infrastructure of civilization.

And near Muynak, its story ends in a landscape transformed by water that stopped arriving.

Before the Amu Darya: mountain water

There is no single spectacular spring at which the Amu Darya suddenly begins.

Its origins are dispersed across an immense mountain system. The Panj drains highland areas of Afghanistan and Tajikistan and forms a large part of their border. The Vakhsh descends through Tajikistan before joining it. From their confluence, the combined river flows westward as the Amu Darya.

The landscape is almost the inverse of what waits downstream.

Steep valleys, snow and glaciated mountains ultimately feed a river that will later cross some of the driest inhabited territory in Eurasia. Water falling or freezing high in the mountains will eventually irrigate fields hundreds of kilometres away.

That physical connection is one reason climate and water management upstream matter so much farther downstream. The Aral basin itself ultimately depends heavily on river systems fed by mountain snow and glacial melt.

The Vakhsh: turning water into electricity

Before joining the Panj, the Vakhsh has acquired another role: energy.

Tajikistan has built much of its electricity system around hydropower, and the enormous Rogun project now under construction on the Vakhsh sits at the centre of that strategy.

In June 2026, the World Bank approved a further $300 million in financing for Rogun. Once fully operational, the plant is expected to generate around 14,400 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually – equivalent to roughly 60 percent of Tajikistan’s current electricity generation – while also allowing greater electricity exports to neighbouring countries.

This illustrates one of the recurring complexities of Central Asian water politics.

For Tajikistan, mountain rivers represent energy security, winter electricity and potential exports. Downstream, the same waters sustain irrigated agriculture.

These interests are not necessarily incompatible. Reservoirs can regulate flows as well as store water. But they mean that water cannot be understood simply in terms of quantity.

When it is stored and when it is released matter too.

Already, before the name Amu Darya even appears on the map, the river has become economic infrastructure.

Then the mountains recede.

Termez: Afghanistan across the water

At Termez, the geopolitics of the Amu Darya become tangible.

The river marks the boundary between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Beyond the Uzbek bank lies Balkh Province, while near the Friendship Bridge the Afghan border town of Hairatan forms one of Afghanistan’s principal gateways to Central Asia.

Here, Afghanistan is not an abstract subject of regional diplomacy.

It is physically across the water.

The Friendship Bridge carries road and railway connections across the Amu Darya. For decades it has accumulated political symbolism – Soviet troops crossed it during the withdrawal from Afghanistan – but today Uzbekistan increasingly wants Termez to represent something different: commerce, logistics and connectivity.

That shift is visible a short distance away at Airitom.

The Airitom Free Zone began operating in August 2024 near the Afghan border. It was explicitly created to promote international and cross-border trade and includes retail, logistics, hotel, medical and other facilities. Afghan citizens can enter the zone without an Uzbek visa for stays of up to 15 days.

The geography is striking: the zone sits beside the Amu Darya itself.

The same river that functions as a state boundary is therefore increasingly being treated as the edge of an economic corridor between Central and South Asia.

Afghanistan returns to the river

Trade is not the only way Afghanistan is reshaping the politics of the Amu Darya.

For most of the Soviet period, water allocation downstream was managed within a single political system. Afghanistan was never fully integrated into the institutional arrangements inherited by the Central Asian republics after 1991.

That asymmetry is now becoming much harder to ignore.

Afghanistan is constructing the 285-kilometre Qosh Tepa Canal across the country’s northern provinces, with the stated objective of bringing Amu Darya water to drought-prone agricultural areas.

From Afghanistan’s perspective, the argument is straightforward: the country has substantial agricultural needs and an interest in using a river flowing along its northern frontier after decades during which its ability to exploit those waters remained comparatively limited.

From downstream Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, the same project looks different.

Every substantial withdrawal upstream potentially reduces what continues towards their irrigated regions. The project has therefore become one of the most consequential new questions in Central Asian water politics.

Yet portraying Qosh Tepa simply as an approaching “water war” would be misleading. The issue is better understood as the emergence of another major water user on an already intensely exploited river.

It reinforces the central fact of the Amu Darya basin:

Everyone has reasons to use more water.

Nobody can manufacture another river.

Turkmenabat: engineering the desert

Farther west, the Amu Darya enters Turkmenistan and passes Turkmenabat.

Here the relationship between water and human settlement becomes even more engineered.

Near the city, Amu Darya water enters the enormous Karakum Canal system, which carries it westwards through Turkmenistan.

The project embodied one of the defining ambitions of Soviet hydraulic planning: rather than accept the constraints imposed by aridity, engineers would move water across the desert.

And physically, they succeeded.

Water could sustain farms, settlements and industries hundreds of kilometres away from the river.

But the same logic was being applied across the basin. Irrigated agriculture expanded dramatically in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, while increasing quantities of water were removed before the Amu Darya reached its delta.

Yet large-scale irrigation itself was hardly a Soviet invention.

Downstream, communities had been redirecting the river for thousands of years.

Khorezm: a civilization built by canals

Few landscapes make that clearer than Khorezm.

Visitors arriving in Khiva encounter one of Central Asia’s most concentrated historic cityscapes: mud-brick walls, turquoise tiles, minarets and courtyards rising from an intensely arid environment.

What they do not encounter is the Amu Darya itself.

Khiva does not stand on the modern riverbank.

That apparent contradiction tells us almost everything about the historical relationship between Khorezm and water.

The city exists because the river was brought to it.

Khiva lies near the edge of cultivated land and historically received Amu Darya water through one of the major canals of the Khorezm oasis.

Long before modern states or Soviet hydraulic projects, inhabitants of Khorezm had learned to transform desert into an oasis through irrigation.

UNESCO’s documentation of the ancient towns and fortresses of the Aral Sea region dates irrigated agriculture in the lower Amu Darya to the end of the second millennium BC and directly links irrigation canals to the emergence of early cities in the region. Novastan has also explored the fortresses and historic landscapes of Khorezm, where the relationship between settlement and water remains visible across the region.

This history is not simply archaeological. The irrigation networks help explain why generations of people could live, farm, trade and build cities in an otherwise extremely arid landscape.

The lower river itself has never been completely stable.

Its channels shifted repeatedly. Canals silted up or were redirected. Settlements prospered and declined as their access to water changed. The Amu Darya still structures movement across Khorezm today, including crossings such as the pontoon bridge near Urgench previously featured by Novastan.

UNESCO’s documentation of ancient Khorezm explicitly notes that changes in the direction of the Amu Darya affected urban centres and that the region’s settlements were closely connected to the river’s shifting courses.

In Khorezm, controlling water meant controlling the geography of civilization itself.

Nukus: downstream of everyone

Approaching Nukus, the Amu Darya has travelled through an extraordinary accumulation of human interventions.

Upstream reservoirs regulate it.

Afghanistan is constructing new irrigation infrastructure from it.

Agricultural regions in Uzbekistan depend upon it.

Turkmenistan diverts part of it westwards.

By the time it reaches Karakalpakstan, the river represents the cumulative result of decisions made across an international basin.

Near Nukus, the Amu Darya spreads through a broad, flat landscape, its channel interrupted by exposed banks and low islands. It looks very different from the mountain water with which the journey began.

Nukus is downstream not simply geographically, but politically.

Communities near the end of a river do not determine their water supply alone. They receive the cumulative result of decisions made everywhere upstream.

That reality remains highly contemporary.

In June 2026, Uzbekistan, UNDP and the Global Environment Facility signed the concept for an Integrated Water Resources Management Plan for the Lower Amu Darya Basin. The initiative is intended to create a more coordinated and science-based framework for managing water resources and ecosystems in the lower river and Aral Sea region.

It represents an attempt to think of the lower Amu Darya increasingly as a connected hydrological system rather than simply as water divided between administrative territories.

But the scale of the historical damage becomes clearer farther north.

Muynak: a port without a sea

At Muynak, one of Central Asia’s most familiar images has almost become too familiar.

Fishing boats sit in sand.

Visitors photograph their rusting hulls. What was once evidence of economic collapse has acquired the strange afterlife of a tourist attraction.

But the boats matter because of what is absent around them.

Water.

The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth-largest inland lake. Its hydrological balance depended heavily on the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. Massive diversion of river water for irrigation caused inflows to collapse and the sea to shrink and fragment.

For Muynak this was not simply an environmental statistic.

It meant the disappearance of the economic geography around which the town had developed.

Fishing and fish processing depended upon a shoreline that progressively moved away. As Oktyabr Dospanov recalled in Novastan’s interview, “My Childhood Was Spent on the Shore of a Sea That No Longer Exists,” Muynak was once a living port rather than the symbol of ecological catastrophe it has since become.

The rusting boats can be read almost as the final objects in a chain that begins in the mountains.

Reservoirs, canals, irrigation systems and agricultural decisions made hundreds or thousands of kilometres upstream all influence how much water ultimately reaches the lowest part of the basin.

The river’s history can almost be read backwards from Muynak.

The sea that did not entirely disappear

Popular descriptions often say simply that the Aral Sea “disappeared.”

The reality is more complicated.

The sea fragmented into separate bodies of water. Large parts of its former seabed are now exposed, while significant differences have developed between the remaining northern and southern water bodies. The ecological catastrophe has been immense, but the Aral is not literally gone.

That distinction matters.

It prevents the region from being reduced to a single image of irreversible apocalypse. The northern Small Aral has, for example, demonstrated that deliberate water-management interventions can produce at least partial ecological recovery.

On the Uzbek side, however, the landscape around the southern remnants conveys the scale of what has been lost.

One river, competing futures

It would be easy to tell the history of the Amu Darya solely as a story of environmental destruction.

That would also be incomplete.

The river continues to sustain millions of people and several very different development strategies.

Tajikistan wants electricity.

Afghanistan wants irrigated farmland.

Uzbekistan needs water for agriculture while attempting to make irrigation more efficient.

Turkmenistan remains deeply dependent on water transported away from the river through its canal system.

Karakalpakstan needs sufficient flows to sustain communities and ecosystems at the end of the basin.

All of these demands are understandable.

The difficulty is that they exist simultaneously.

Qosh Tepa therefore matters not because competition for the Amu Darya is new, but because the political geography of that competition is changing.

Afghanistan is becoming a far more significant water user in a system whose post-Soviet institutions were largely built without it. Tajikistan’s hydropower development, downstream irrigation, ecological restoration and climate pressures meanwhile have to coexist within the same hydrological system.

There is no single technological solution that eliminates that basic constraint.

More efficient irrigation can help. Better canals can help. Improved regional coordination can help. Basin-level management can help.

But none can make the Amu Darya infinite.

From ice to sand – and water again

The extraordinary thing about following the Amu Darya is how many different worlds can belong to a single river.

In the mountains, its water begins among snow and glaciers.

Along the Panj, it separates Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

On the Vakhsh, it becomes electricity.

At Termez, the river forms Uzbekistan’s frontier with Afghanistan while Airitom attempts to turn that frontier into a commercial gateway.

In Khorezm, canals carried the river towards cities that could never have survived without it.

Near Nukus, the consequences of decisions taken across the basin accumulate.

At Muynak, ships remain stranded where water once stood.

And farther beyond them, parts of the Aral Sea remain.

Central Asia’s cities are usually explained through monuments, rulers and empires – the walls of Khiva, Buddhist Termez, Nukus’s museums.

Another history runs beneath all of them.

It is a history of glaciers, channels, dams and canals.

The Amu Darya has determined where settlement was possible, where agriculture could flourish and where political power could accumulate for thousands of years.

High in the mountains, water still begins its journey towards the plains.

At the other end of that journey, ships stand in the desert while a diminished sea survives beyond them.

Between those two landscapes lies much of Central Asia’s past – and one of the defining questions of its future.

By Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English.

The post From the Pamirs to the Aral Sea: Following the Amu Darya Through Central Asia appeared first on Novastan English.

Archaeologist and museum specialist Oktyabr Dospanov on the lost world of Muynak, the memory of the Aral Sea and the cultural heritage of Karakalpakstan.

For much of the outside world, Muynak is represented by a single image: rusting ships stranded in a desert. For Oktyabr Dospanov, however, the town was once an island, a busy port and the setting of a childhood filled with ship bells, gulls, music and the smell of freshly caught fish. In this interview, the Karakalpak archaeologist and museum specialist recalls the human world that disappeared with the Aral Sea, explains why the region’s cultural history reaches far beyond the ecological catastrophe, and reflects on what should be preserved for future generations.

This interview was conducted in Russian and translated into English.

See more on Novastan: Souvenirs éphémères

The story of the Aral Sea is usually told through statistics: falling water levels, rising salinity, abandoned ports and millions of tonnes of salt and dust lifted from the exposed seabed. Those figures describe the scale of the disaster, but they cannot fully convey what it meant to lose a sea that organised the economy, culture and daily rhythms of an entire region. Dospanov belongs to the last generation that remembers the Aral as an ordinary presence rather than a vanished world. Born in Muynak, he later became an archaeologist and museum specialist. His professional path began in 1979, when Igor Savitsky invited him to join an expedition at Janpyk Kala, an ancient Khorezmian settlement near the Sultan Uvays mountains. He subsequently worked at the museum in Nukus that now bears Savitsky’s name, devoting decades to the archaeology, ethnography, art and environmental history of Karakalpakstan.

Novastan: You grew up in Muynak when it was still a living port. What kind of town was it?

Oktyabr Dospanov: My childhood was spent in Muynak, which at that time was a real island in the Aral Sea. For me, it is not simply my birthplace. It was an entire world, filled with sounds, smells and the feeling of continuous life. It is difficult today to imagine that Muynak was once one of the region’s largest fishing centres.

The town’s life was inseparable from the sea. There were five large fishing collectives, twelve fish reception points and two cargo ports. One was in Muynak itself, on the shore, and the other was around twenty kilometres away at Usay, on the opposite side of the island. The fishing industry set the rhythm of the whole town.

Muynak seemed never to sleep. Even late at night, people were always walking through the streets: some going to work, others returning after their shift. Work continued around the clock. I can still hear the ship bells, the grinding of the port cranes, and the hum of fishing vessels and engines. These sounds were a natural part of everyday life.

The city was also remarkably diverse. Engineers, sailors, fishermen, teachers, doctors, scientists and artists came from across the Soviet Union. Karakalpaks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Russians, Tatars, Koreans, Ukrainians and many others lived side by side. In the mahallas, neighbours helped one another build houses, celebrated holidays together and supported families in difficult times. That sense of community was one of Muynak’s greatest riches.

What do you remember most vividly about the sea itself?

For my generation, the Aral was not a symbol of tragedy. It was the symbol of a happy childhood, filled with the sound of waves and the cries of gulls. Hundreds of vessels stood at Muynak’s quays: cargo ships, fishing schooners, tankers, barges and tugboats. The port operated day and night. It seemed impossible that the sea could ever disappear.

The coast was rich in life. There were reed beds, lakes and wetlands, and an extraordinary number of birds: pheasants, wild ducks, flamingos, pelicans and, above all, gulls. The silver gulls that local people affectionately called ‘laughing gulls’ accompanied us from morning until evening. Fishermen watched them because they could reveal the position of shoals of fish.

I also remember the clean, fresh air. The sea did not have the harsh salty smell that people often imagine. A constant wind made even the hottest summer days easier to bear. In winter, the sea froze and the cold was severe. We swam, fished and played football on the shore. Children came to the nearby pioneer camp from many parts of the Soviet Union, and the coast had holiday homes, sanatoriums and tourist facilities.

See more on Novastan: A sécher

What remains most powerfully in my memory is not a landscape but a smell. When I was five or six, my father and his friend Ibadulla took me out in a small wooden boat. Far from the shore, we met a large fishing seiner commanded by a man named Tazhibay-aga. He showed me the bridge, the cabins and the engine room. The hold was filled with fish. I pointed to the largest one, a huge catfish, and insisted that it was a shark. Everyone laughed.

We stayed on the vessel for almost two days. I saw how the fishermen worked and lived. The engine room smelled of diesel fuel, motor oil, metal, sea moisture, fresh fish, wooden decks and salt-soaked ropes. It was sharp, but warm and alive. To me, that was the smell of the real Aral Sea. Sometimes I close my eyes and I am back there, hearing the engine and the waves against the hull.

Muynak also had a social and cultural life that is rarely mentioned. Where did young people meet?

Muynak did not live by work alone. It had two cinemas. The best known was Sputnik, just a few steps from the shore and beside the market. After an evening screening in summer, people would walk along the waterfront, listen to the waves and stay outside talking for a long time. Later, in the second half of the 1980s, the Berdakh cinema opened in another part of the city. It was a modern cultural centre for films, concerts and public events.

The cultural centre of the fish-canning plant was another important place. It had a library and hosted theatre, amateur performances, concerts and celebrations. Young people especially loved the weekend dances. Many people met their future partners there.

There were also several cafes. The most famous was Tolqyn, which means ‘wave’ in Karakalpak. It was not simply somewhere to eat or drink tea. Families celebrated birthdays and weddings there, friends met, music played, and people exchanged news and made plans.

Music was everywhere. On warm evenings, young people gathered spontaneously in courtyards, on squares or near the sea. Someone would bring a guitar, accordion or bayan, and people would sing together. There were no mobile phones or social networks. People listened to one another and spent long evenings in company. At weddings and major family celebrations, bakhshi – traditional storytellers and musicians – performed epics and legends to the accompaniment of instruments such as the dutar. Ancient oral tradition and modern youth culture existed naturally alongside each other.

When did people understand that the retreat of the sea was irreversible?

The process was gradual. The first alarming signs became visible in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At first, people hoped it was temporary and that the sea would return. A special canal was dug from the port towards the receding water so that vessels could continue to sail. But the water withdrew faster than people could adapt.

Fishermen noticed the change first. Their catches became smaller. Fewer schooners went out. Ships that had entered the port freely began to run aground, surrounded by sand and salt blown from the exposed seabed.

Read more on Novastan: Football de rue

I remember how the sound of the city changed. Muynak had always lived through the noise of its port: bells, cranes, engines, fishermen’s voices, metal cables and waves at the quays. Then came silence. It arrived almost imperceptibly, but that silence was the most frightening thing. When the ships stop sounding, when the sea can no longer be heard and the port ceases to live, you understand that more than water is disappearing. An entire world is going.

The marine painter Rafael Matevosyan, who devoted more than half a century to the Aral Sea, described an early morning when he woke to voices and crying. Residents had gathered on the shore. Overnight, the water had retreated by dozens of metres. Boats that had been moored at the pier were lying on dry sand. Some people prayed, some cried and others simply stared at the departing water. Matevosyan later captured that moment in a painting called The Sea Has Gone.

The human consequences came quickly. Enterprises closed, fishing declined and families lost their livelihoods. Many people left Muynak for other cities or republics. The city lost not only employment and population, but also confidence in its future.

“Then came silence. It arrived almost imperceptibly, but that silence was the most frightening thing.”

What disappeared with the sea beyond the fishing industry?

Fishing was not just a source of income. It was one of the oldest forms of economic life in the Aral region and had shaped people’s identity for centuries. Archaeological excavations reveal fish represented on ceramics, bronze objects, wall paintings and household items. Fish also appeared in carpets, embroidery, jewellery, woodcarving and textiles. It symbolised water, life and prosperity in an arid region.

For many families, fishing and factory work passed from parents to children. To work at the fish-canning plant was considered respectable. People were proud that their labour mattered to the whole country. When the sea disappeared, traditions that had formed over generations also weakened: techniques and practical knowledge, recipes and fish cuisine, songs, stories and the everyday vocabulary of life by the water.

The psychological loss was equally important. Many residents came to feel that they had been left at the edge of a lifeless desert, far from the world’s attention, with the best part of their lives behind them. When former residents meet today, they often cry. Those tears express joy at seeing one another, but also nostalgia for a world that cannot be restored.

That is why the memories of the last witnesses matter so much. There are still people who remember the port cranes, the crowded waterfront, the smell of fresh fish and the horizon of open water, but their number decreases every year. Their oral histories, family photographs, songs and personal objects are part of the region’s heritage. The Aral Sea is not merely an environmental problem. It is the fate of millions of people.

Tourists now come to photograph the ship cemetery. What do you wish they understood about Muynak?

I am glad that people are interested in our region, but I would like them to see more than an unusual tourist attraction. Behind every ship is a human life. Behind every photograph are thousands of families who lost the world they knew. Every metre of exposed seabed contains the memories of people who sailed from this port, caught fish, built homes, raised children and believed the sea would last forever.

Visitors should try to imagine another picture: an expanse of water reaching the horizon, fishing vessels returning to port, gulls overhead, children laughing on the shore and a town full of movement. Only then can they understand what was lost.

At the same time, Karakalpakstan should not be reduced to catastrophe. This region has been a crossroads of nomadic and settled civilisations for thousands of years. The art of the Aral region carries images of animals, birds, plants, water and steppe. Its carpets, textiles, jewellery, embroidery, carved wood and yurt interiors preserve symbols that connect people to the natural world. Muynak was one part of a much wider cultural landscape.

Your own career began with archaeology. How did Igor Savitsky influence you?

My path into science began in 1979, when I met Igor Vitalyevich Savitsky. He invited me to join an archaeological expedition at Janpyk Kala, one of the great monuments of ancient Khorezm on the right bank of the Amu Darya. That expedition became my school of archaeology. It showed me how rich and insufficiently studied the history of Karakalpakstan was.

Savitsky later invited me to work at the museum in Nukus. He was not only a remarkable artist, collector and museum builder. He taught a whole generation to see culture as an interconnected whole. Through him, I understood that archaeology is not simply excavation. It is a way of understanding people, their worldview and their relationship with nature, history and art.

Karakalpakstan is an open-air museum. It has hundreds of archaeological sites, from antiquity to the late medieval period. Ancient Khorezm stood at the meeting point of major Eurasian trade and cultural routes. Nomadic and settled worlds interacted here, alongside influences from Iran, the Mediterranean, the steppe, Turkic states, the Arab world and Central Asia. Irrigation systems created from at least the first millennium BCE made possible cities, fortresses, palaces and settlements in desert landscapes.

The region’s spiritual history is equally layered. Zoroastrian, Buddhist, early Christian and Islamic traditions all left traces in monuments, rituals, ornament and symbolism. Archaeology records those processes in layers of soil and objects, while oral tradition preserves them in images and stories. Both are necessary.

Savitsky’s importance also lies in the way he built the museum. When he founded it in 1966, he created departments of archaeology and ethnography alongside the art collection. He had first come to Karakalpakstan through the Khorezm Archaeological and Ethnographic Expedition, and during fieldwork he produced hundreds of paintings and drawings of archaeological sites, village life, plants, animals and the region’s changing light. He was interested in the smallest details of traditional culture – a ceramic ornament, carved wood, a textile pattern or a piece of metalwork – because he saw each of them as a language through which a people expressed its worldview.

His study of Karakalpak traditional woodcarving remains especially important to me. He showed how the decorative culture of the region emerged from the meeting of settled agricultural traditions and the nomadic culture of the steppe. At the same time, he understood that many Russian artists of the 1920s and 1930s had been erased from public life by repression and ideological pressure. He largely gave up his own artistic career to find, protect and collect their work. That devotion created one of the world’s most important collections of Russian avant-garde and early Soviet art.

He was equally committed to the emerging Karakalpak school of painting. Kydyrbay Saipov, then the region’s only professionally trained artist, became his close friend and ally. Together they encouraged younger artists, organised exhibitions and helped create an artistic environment in which remarkable talents could develop. Among the painters associated with this generation were Zhollybay Izentaev, Zholdasbek Kutymuratov, Abdulla Erimbetov, Bazarbay Serekeev, Aman Atabaev, Murat Khudaybergenov, Daribay Tazhimuratov and Amangeldy Utegenov.

My strongest memory of Savitsky is still from the expeditions. He was modest and extraordinarily hardworking. He could spend hours examining a ceramic vessel, an ornament or a fragment of cloth, explaining its symbols and the techniques used to make it. Every find and every meeting with a traditional craftsperson delighted him. He did not merely study culture; he lived through it.

Which landscapes or historical places best reveal the depth of Karakalpakstan?

The Ustyurt Plateau is unlike anywhere else. Its chinks, cliffs and canyons are magnificent, but the landscape also contains ancient and medieval burial mounds, necropolises, caravanserais, wells and signal towers. They recall the routes that connected East and West across an extremely demanding environment. The saiga is a symbol of Ustyurt, and images of these animals appear in rock art thousands of years old.

The former seabed is also becoming a new and extraordinary landscape. It attracts ecologists, geologists, archaeologists and palaeontologists. Along former shorelines, people find fossil shells, marine remains and, according to local accounts, even the teeth of ancient sharks – reminders that the geological history of this territory reaches back to seas far older than the Aral.

Karakalpakstan is therefore much more than a disaster zone. It is a place where one can read the history of the Earth and the history of human civilisation in the same landscape. Natural and cultural heritage are inseparable here.

Can the region recover environmentally, and what has changed through the planting of saxaul?

When the sea dried, its exposed bottom became a saline desert. Dust and salt storms carried sand, salt and chemical residues over enormous distances. Planting saxaul, kandym and other desert shrubs was one of the most effective ways to stabilise the soil. After decades of work, vegetation now covers significant areas of the former seabed, reducing the intensity of dust and salt storms and creating conditions for new ecosystems. Some animals and birds are returning.

This does not mean the crisis is solved. Safe drinking water, efficient water management, public health, education, transport and sustainable employment remain fundamental. Climate change adds pressure by altering rainfall, accelerating glacier loss in the Pamirs and Tien Shan, and changing the flow of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. The full restoration of the former sea is an extremely difficult question and cannot depend on one country alone. It requires regional cooperation and rational water use.

The most important lesson is that economic development must not again be built on the assumption that nature is inexhaustible. Any new investment should create dignified local employment, use water responsibly and meet high environmental standards. The people who live here must benefit directly.

Whose work should people read or see if they want to understand Karakalpakstan beyond the Aral Sea disaster?

First, I would name Berdakh, the great Karakalpak poet. His work became one of the spiritual foundations of the national culture. It speaks about the history of the people, moral values, love of the native land and the search for justice and freedom. No less important is Ajiniyaz, one of Central Asia’s major poets and thinkers, whose writing celebrated solidarity between peoples, humanism and respect for human dignity.

In the visual arts, one must of course return to Igor Savitsky and to the artists whose work he helped preserve. Rafael Matevosyan is also indispensable to the memory of the Aral Sea. For more than half a century he painted its water, boats, fishermen and everyday life. Gulls appear repeatedly in his work. After the sea had largely disappeared, he would visit the exposed seabed and say: ‘I believe my gulls will return.’ Those words were later inscribed on his grave.

There is also a deeply personal figure I do not want to omit: my uncle, the Karakalpak writer and translator Shaniyaz Mambetmuratov. He died when he was only 43, but he left an important mark on the literature and culture of Karakalpakstan. The Aral Sea was at the centre of his writing – its open waters, the Amu Darya, fishermen, the landscape and the lives, labour and hopes of ordinary people.

He was extraordinarily well read. It seemed that there was hardly a book in Muynak’s municipal library that he had not opened. He translated foreign authors into Karakalpak, hoping both to introduce local readers to world literature and to show outsiders the richness of his own culture. In the 1960s and 1970s, he used to say that one day Europeans would come to Muynak and the Aral Sea to discover the beauty, history and culture of this region. At the time, that sounded almost impossible.

Part of his work was translated into German and a collection was published in Germany, although he did not live to see it. In a sense, his prediction has now come true: people arrive from across the world, not only to witness an ecological catastrophe but also to learn about Karakalpakstan’s literature, culture, history and inhabitants. As long as his books are read, his voice continues to speak.

Dospanov shared two of his uncle’s poems, translated here, especially for Novastan, from Karakalpak via Russian.

The Seagull

1959

— Seagull, soaring high across the sky,
You seem a messenger of my love.
Why do you circle anxiously above me,
Calling me once more towards the seashore?

— Seagull, flying through the blue of heaven,
Why do you fill my heart with restless thoughts?
Had I not caressed the waves of the sea,
Would spring ever have returned to these shores?

The Blue Sea

1958

Do not judge me harshly when I praise the sea;
Simply look towards the blue edge of the earth.
Like a festive salute marking a great victory,
The blue sea laughs before my eyes.

This blue sea is my native Aral;
With all my soul, I breathe its fresh wind.
And should you wish to know what makes it so majestic,
Know this: within it live both my destiny and my age.

Who else should journalists speak to while the memory of the old Muynak is still alive?

They should begin with the remaining members of the older generation: former fishermen, ship captains, workers from the fish-canning plant and residents of the coastal settlements. They remember the cranes, boats, factory, crowded waterfront, fresh fish and uninterrupted horizon. Such memories cannot be reconstructed from official archives once the witnesses are gone.

It is equally important to record artists, musicians, traditional craftspeople and guardians of oral culture. Young ecologists, archaeologists, museum professionals, historians and civic activists should also be heard, because they connect the past with the region’s future. And journalists should not overlook teachers, farmers, doctors, students and women raising families. The real history of Karakalpakstan is made from many ordinary lives, not only from famous names.

We are among the last living witnesses of the full Aral Sea. That creates a duty to preserve oral testimony, family photographs, private archives, household objects, songs and stories. These materials are as important to the region’s heritage as archaeological monuments and museum collections.

What gives you hope when you think about the future of Muynak and Karakalpakstan?

Above all, people give me hope. Despite everything this region has experienced, its inhabitants have not lost their love for their land or their willingness to work for its future. Human resilience has always been the main strength of the Aral region.

I see a younger generation studying foreign languages, ecology, archaeology, art, museum work, science and information technology. Many of them do not want to turn away from their history. They want to preserve it and show the world that Karakalpakstan is a region of extraordinary cultural heritage and future possibilities.

The world’s growing interest also matters. Archaeologists, artists, scientists, photographers, travellers and students come not only because of the Aral Sea, but also for ancient Khorezm, Ustyurt, the Savitsky Museum and Karakalpak culture.

If I had unlimited resources, I would set three priorities. The first would be human welfare: drinking water, health care, education, infrastructure and good jobs, particularly so that young people can imagine a future here. The second would be ecological restoration and responsible use of natural resources, including water-saving technologies and continued planting on the former seabed. The third would be culture, science and international cooperation. I would like Karakalpakstan to become a major centre for archaeology, museum partnerships, artistic residencies, environmental education and cultural tourism.

The future cannot rest only on natural resources or only on economic growth. It must bring people, nature and culture into balance.

Is there one story you would most like European readers to carry with them?

I would tell them the story of the Camel Trail. Elders said that long before modern roads, caravan routes crossed Ustyurt and the shores of the Aral Sea. Camels connected Khorezm with the Volga region, Kazakhstan and lands farther east and west. They sensed the route better than people and could find wells and caravanserais even at night, in sandstorms or fog.

One trail, used by generations of caravans, led towards the Aral Sea. It was not merely a road. It carried trade, encounters, knowledge and culture. Merchants, craftsmen, poets and pilgrims travelled along it. Goods moved with songs, legends, ideas and traditions.

As the sea retreated, harbours vanished and routes were covered by sand. Yet people say the Camel Trail did not disappear. It survived in memory. You may no longer see it on a map, but you can feel it when travelling through the region. It is an invisible thread between past and present.

For me, the legend means that the most important roads do not cross only deserts and steppes. They pass through human memory. Today, the trail can acquire a new meaning. Where caravans once carried goods, it can now carry research, cultural projects, art and friendship between peoples. It can become a symbol of dialogue between Central Asia and Europe.

Perhaps the trail no longer exists on the ground. But while memory remains alive, the road never ends.

Mathieu Lemoine, Editor-in-Chief for Novastan-English

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On the way to what remains of the Aral Sea, groups of dromedaries and camels can be seen along the roadside. We are in the middle of the Kazak steppes and few species can survive in this inhospitable environment. The contrast between the beauty of the landscape and its harshness is overwhelming. Aral district, Kazakhstan, 2024

Credits: Simone Bergonzi (@simobergz, Italy)

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The smoke of a local bakery fills the air of a village deep in the Jizzakh region, Uzbekistan.

This photo was taken during the filming of Mission: Find Aral, a documentary investigating the ecological impact of the disappearance of the Aral Sea, the impact its drying up is having on local communities and the future of the region. The Aral Sea is a saltwater lake located in southern Uzbekistan and northern Kazakhstan.

Credits : Saxon Bosworth (@saxonbosworth, @missionfindaral, https://decouvrirlavie.com, United Kingdom)

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It is arguably the greatest man-made environmental catastrophe in history. Moynaq, once an important fishing town on the shores of the Aral Sea, now lies on the edge of the desert, with the Aral Sea pushed back 150 km! These two rusting ships have been towed, along with nine others, from another part of the desert to form a kind of tourist attraction. This is all that remains of the 500 or so boats that once docked in the town of Moynaq.

Credits: Matic Pavlin (@matic_pavlin, Slovenia)

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A PLACE IN CENTRAL ASIA – A victim of one of the greatest ecological catastrophes of the twentieth century, the Aral Sea, which is located in northern Uzbekistan and western Kazakhstan, has lost more than 75% of its total volume over many decades since the Soviet period. It has now reached the point of being called the “Aral Desert,” however, since the construction of a dam in 2005, hope seems to have returned to Aralsk, on the Kazakh side, as the water level begins to rise and fishermen fill their nets once again; but for how long?This article was originally published on Novastan’s French website on 28 May 2021. Since the 1960s, the cultivation of cotton rapidly increased in Central Asia. The Amu-Darya and the Syr-Darya rivers, which feed into the Aral Sea, were consequently diverted in order to irrigate the cotton plantations. The sea quickly lost 75% to 90% of its total volume and the water’s salinity increased dramatically, killing off most of the sea’s biodiversity. Water gave way to immense expanses of desert and salt flats. To this ecological disaster add social catastrophe: most of the population around the Aral Sea had relied on the fishing industry to make a living. Now, with the industry completely abandoned and villages left empty, a few families who stayed turned to camel breeding as a new way of life.

Located western Kazakhstan, Aralsk is a former fishing port and cotton trading centre. With the receding coast since the 1960s, the Aral Sea today is 90 kilometres from Aralsk. In strolling the city’s dusty streets at the end of 2019, it was difficult to imagine such a glorious seaside past; only the ruins of the port’s infrastructure and some maritime signage recalled a vanished prosperity that once was.

The Kokaral Dam, a bit of good news

The construction of the Kokaral Dam (or Dike Kokaral) in 2005 resulted in a six meter rise of the sea’s water level in the northern portion of the sea, called the Little Aral Sea. Inhabitants of Aralsk found hope in this, even though the sea remained more than 30 kilometres from its old piers. Read more on Novastan: The Aral Sea artemia: small shrimp, high stakes The stalls of the only fish shop in the city were soon stocked again and the main roads were finally paved, which led to a whisper of optimism among the sandy streets of the city.

In order to develop tourism, a few local guides began taking their chances with the imposing shells of old rusty boats. These old boats are in danger of disappearing as locals cut them up into metal sheets to reuse or sell. In the 2000s, fifteen of these boats were counted; at the end of 2019, only one remained. Even so, some Kazakh tourists enjoy a hot spring, formerly below sea level, for its rumoured miraculous powers.

In Tastubek, water is money

In Tastubek, located about one hundred kilometre’s from Aralsk, life goes on. The rise in sea level put fishermen back to work and woke up this village, which had been snoozing for several decades. The old ships had set out to sea again, new houses began to pop up; from only 90 houses in 1960, the village saw its population reduced to eight households in 1996, but in 2019 there were 32. Six o’clock in the evening, and the weather is ideal: the sun is bright and the wind non-existent. Nourljan and Arman collect the nets they untangled in the afternoon and take a spin in their UAZ, a Soviet off-road vehicle commonly used here. With the recent rise in water level, the sea is only a ten-minute drive from the village. At the shore they hop into their father’s old boat armed with three nets and a GPS tag, setting up for the following morning. With optimism and focus, these two young men are ready to fish some of the 15 species now reintroduced into the Aral Sea.

Determined fishermen

Alarms go off at five o’clock the following morning. Nourljan is hopeful as the calm of the previous night promises an excellent catch. A few minutes later Arman joins him in the UAZ. The bumpy former seabed tests the vehicle’s suspension and reinforces the determination of the two fishermen.

A 60-year-old widow, Vayan, lives with her son, Nourljan. When is he is out fishing, Vayan takes care of the house and helps her granddaughter with her homework. At noon, as with every return of the fishermen, fish will take the seat of honour at the table. She prepares camel meat for the evening meal, “The men go fishing and the women tend to the camels. That’s how it works here,” says Vayan, but she hopes her granddaughter will one day leave the village to study at a university.

The fishermen are active again

The three nets are collected and fish cover the floor; it’s time to go back. Arman’s face is serious: the catch wasn’t good today, despite ideal conditions. Only 12 kilograms were caught, versus about fifty on a typical day — a bit of respite for the seabed. Quotas are rarely respected in the Aral Sea, now a chronic victim of overfishing.

Tastubek has rediscovered its former glory. The fishermen live comfortably from their labour, and electricity finally lights their homes, but not all villages along the former shores of the Aral Sea have the same fate. Too far from the shore, some villages remain dormant, sometimes buried under sand; rambling and raising camels remain the only escape from an ordinary morning in this new life in the desert of the Aral Sea.

The disaster continues

The renewed enthusiasm of fishermen and of government announcements seems like a victory: the Aral Sea is saved! However, the reality is much more nuanced. If the sea’s disappearance has been partly avoided, the disaster continues against a background of optimism. The announcement of the sea’s miracle rescue has only served to increase local overconsumption of water and overfishing, accentuated by renewed demographic pressure. Worse still, the cultivation of rice and cotton, massive consumers of water, has not diminished in recent years. Moreover, if the Kazakh side is doing better, the historic Uzbek side remains hopelessly arid.

The Kokaral Dam has become a symbol of the mirage of Aral — a deliverer of promises and future disappointments. Many locals talk about increasing the height of the dam, which would allow water to return to the port of Aralsk, but skeptics have already become accustomed to the absurdity of living in a port with no sea. « A Place in Central Asia » is a collection of articles about under-represented or under-reported places in the region. Find out more by clicking here. Want to participate? Send your ideas about places to editorial[at]novastan.org.

Antoine Béguier Freelance Photographer

Translated from French by Judy Harter

Edited by Kiki Gray

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Main street in Moynaq, nowadays a dusty provincial town which once used to be a thriving port on the southern shore of Aral Sea and the center of fishing industry of the Uzbek SSR.Credit: Konstantin Novakovic (Serbia) Find all of our photos of the day here.

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Former fishing fleet of Moynaq lying in the lakebed of recessed Aral Sea which now occupies the Aralkum Desert in Uzbekistan. Credit: Konstantin Novakovic (Serbia) Find all of our photos of the day here.

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Aral Sea Monument in Moynaq placed above the former shore of the lake features the depictions of the Aral Sea in 1960 and the current state that are clearly showing its recession and the scale of this environmental disaster.

Credit: Konstantin Novaković (Serbia)

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On the ancient shores of a dried-up Aral Sea, a camel stands motionless, like a symbol of the region’s desertification.

Credit: Antoine Beguier (France)

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The blue of the Aral Sea, here on the Uzbek side, seems to mix with the clear sky on the horizon.

Credit: Simon Kretschmer (Germany)

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In Kazakhstan, fifty years ago, this house was located on the edge of the sea. As the Aral continues to dry up, the coastline has shifted by 90 km.

Credit : Antoine Béguier (France)

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In a hotel in Moynaq, a former coastal town on the Aral Sea, the owners are moving to a more prosperous town. They leave behind them a flaking painting depicting the Aral Sea in 1977.

Credit : Cyril Caldero (France)

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The Aral Sea in the far west of Uzbekistan, photographed from a yurt camp, glistens in the midday sun.

Credit: Simon Kretschmer (Germany)

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Living Asia’s journalists took a trip to the North Aral Sea, in Kazakhstan, where they witnessed the opening of a fish breeding plant, a hatchery. There, they saw the full process of transformation of eggs into young fish and their journey to the delta lake. In addition, they learnt how fishery professionals are trained in this region and explored how these projects help replenish the lake’s fish stocks.

This article first appeared in Russian on ЛИВЕНЬ. Living Asia on 11 November 2020.

As it dried up in the second half of the 20th century, the Aral Sea split into two bodies of water, the North Aral and South Aral, also known as Small and Large Aral. While the larger South Aral has itself become several lakes, efforts to revive the northern part have met with some success: water levels have risen and salinity has dropped, leading to the return of fish.

In a previous article, Living Asia discussed the death of fish during spring spawning season when water is discharged from Small Aral to Large Aral and about the annual decline of fish stocks in the Aral Sea. Unfortunately, with current intensive fishing, no-one is involved in replenishing them. This depletes fish stocks. Not only in the Aral Sea are fish stocks rapidly disappearing: they also are endangered in the other lakes of the delta of the Syr Darya River.

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For many years this region was the main supplier of fish for the entire former Soviet Union. In recent years, however, intensive fishing and poaching have caused immense damage to the ecosystem.

Ainakul Baimakhanova, coordinator of a group of projects for sustainable fishery in the Aral Sea region, said: “For locals, the fish living in these reservoirs is the most accessible foodstuff. More than one generation of fishermen grew up here. People are used to feeding their families this way. But the locals don’t think that the fish might tomorrow simply run out! Unsystematic, uncoordinated fishing counts as poaching, but the people living around the lake practice it anyway.”

The reduction of fish stocks already negatively impacts all the delta ecosystems. After all, lakes in that region of Kazakhstan like Akkol, Mariamkol, Kuan Darya and others are a part of the wetlands. Furthermore, they are within the borders of key ornithological areas. Fortunately, it is possible to regenerate the unique delta ecosystem of the region. It is already being done by re-stocking the fish population.

Opening a hatchery

To date, aquaculture has almost completely disappeared from the Aral District. Breeding fish is barely practiced by the local population and there are practically no hatcheries in the area. To repopulate the lake, juvenile fish up to a year old are brought in from the neighbouring district, which is 180-190 km away. This raises the costs of fish production and causes high losses during transportation. The fry (very young fish) simply do not survive on the road.

The capacity of existing fish farms in this region simply is not enough. To replenish lake stocks faster and more sustainably, there is the idea of setting up mid-sized hatcheries in the field.

Thus, in early 2020, the local public association “Kazaly Oasis” established a commercial hatchery and fish farm in the village of Aqshataý in the Aral District. This was possible thanks to the support of the fishing processing business Igilikov, the producer’s cooperative Jambyl and the United Nations’ GEF Small Grants Programme in Kazakhstan.

Through the project, local people, most coming from a long line of former fishermen, were educated in fishery. The celebratory opening of the fish hatchery in late June 2020 was attended by the head of the local district government (or akim), various other officials and Living Asia’s team.

Mukhtar Orazbaev, akim of the Aral District, says: “This is a very essential project for our region. We will be able to take young fish from the hatchery to release them into the Aral Sea and the neighbouring Kazalinsky District. If the hatchery works year-round, the fish stock in the lakes and sea will significantly improve. You are doing a great job, I wish you success!”

How the hatchery works

The fish breeding plant is located in a fairly large space of 16 by 30 metres. This is where the closed water supply units purchased by the project are located.

All parameters of the technological process (water conditioning, feeding, checks and more) are monitored and managed with the help of programmable automated devices. This minimises the influence of natural factors on the technological process.

The hatchery also breeds female fish which were rescued from the Aral Sea. The eggs are first stored in flasks before they are transferred to pools. Fish farmers and fishery specialists carefully observe all the processes in order to raise as much fry (very young fish) as possible.

The fry and fingerlings (juvenile fish in various stages of development) are distributed among twelve lake fish farms. They are put in special bags and transported by car to different areas of the water reservoir.

Ainakul Baimakhanova says: “All the locals are interested in the success of this project because the lake, water and fish are their life. In our district everyone is interested in working with us. People want to develop their businesses, they want to create new job opportunities in the towns and villages. Thanks to the changes, the population’s social situation improves every year.”

Education centre for fish specialists

Due to the growing demand for fish, small local fish-processing workshops have emerged in the Aral Sea region. This has increased the need for specialists with a certain level of professional skills. Modern fish-processing plants have to handle different types of fish and prepare them for export according to EU regulations.

Moreover, the region is lacking qualified fish farmers who could support local fishermen to competently collect fish from reservoirs and restock them.

To solve these problems, in 2019 an education centre for sustainable fishery technology and the protection of fish resources was established on the premises of the NGO Khana Aral Tolkyny. For a year, the centre has been training fishery experts.

A new cohort of specialists started training in February 2020. Classes were held in the centre and on location in the villages while practical training took place in fisheries.

Fish farmers were taught the particularities of different types of fish, breeding methods, artificial reproduction, technology for larvae germination, feeding, selection basics for fish breeding and the organisation of production processes for pond farming.

Fish processors learned to sort their catch and studied processing equipment and production technologies for salted, pickled and spicy products, canned fish and seafood.

Read more: The Aral Sea artemia: small shrimp, high stakes

The opening of the education centre is very important for the region. Thanks to it, unemployed women and young people finally found an outlet for their strengths and abilities. New specialists are already finding employment in fisheries and fish processing facilities.

Ainakul Baimakhanova says: “We planned to graduate 40 fish farmers, but in the end we trained 52. We graduated a bit more than 200 fish processors, just like we planned. But aside from farmers and processing professionals, we still need highly specialised experts. The issue of their training has not been resolved yet.

Now we are making arrangements with the Employment Centre, which helps to find jobs for the unemployed, trains hairdressers and so on. The Employment Centre could include fish farming and processing in the professions they teach. Our graduates have gained qualitative knowledge, which is why business owners are happy to take them in. Can you imagine how many more people could still find work?

I am grateful to the Small Grants Programme for supporting our ideas. We really need these projects for the revitalisation of our region.

We think of the future. We want to preserve biodiversity and nature’s beauty for future generations. So that there will be many types of fish in the water reservoirs, so that flowers grow on the waterside, so that things change for the better. So that people have good living conditions, happy children and a comfortable home.”

Oksana Tarnetskaya
ЛИВЕНЬ. Living Asia

Translated from Russian by Nora Heinonen

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The post Kazakhstan: replenishing the Aral Sea’s fish stocks appeared first on Novastan English.

The artemia, or brine shrimp, a small crustacean that lives in salt water, has become the main product of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. The Uzbek government has recently centralised artemia production into a single company, a plan which did not seem to please everyone on the ground.

This article was originally published on Novastan’s French website on 21 July 2020.

The Aral Sea was the fourth largest lake in the world 60 years ago. Today, it has almost completely been dried out due to human activities, causing the disappearance of millions of fish and reducing the number of species by five. However, despite this environmental disaster, one species has survived: the artemia. With the sea now dried up, local fishermen have turned to this saltwater shellfish to generate the majority of their income. The fishermen of Moynaq, in western Uzbekistan, have thus started collecting and processing these shrimps due to the shortage of fish.

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The shrinking of the Aral Sea has increased the salinity of the water which explains the growing numbers of artemia, which thrive in very salty water. The 1 millimetre-long crustacean is generally used to feed fish but also has uses in science, fishkeeping, medicine, pharmacy and cosmetics. The larvae (known as cysts) can be stored for years and can withstand extreme differences in temperature.

Towards a monopoly

But the future of the artemia industry has been a source of controversy since since 2019. On 31 October 2019, the Uzbek government proposed that the 23 or so companies involved in the artemia industry be centralised into just one.

Despite the Antimonopoly Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan’s protests and the recommendations against the project it published on 15 June 2020, Uzbekistan’s prime minister Abdulla Aripov signed a decree on 14 July of the same year creating a state-owned company responsible for the capture, processing and export of artemia cysts. The new structure, Orol Artemia Sanoat, is also meant to support the scientific, technical and technological development of the industry.

The Antimonopoly Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan deemed this centralization ill-advised, an opinion it supports through a text recommending the Uzbek government be less involved in the economy. This point of view is in line with the political philosophy of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who says he wants to privatise the domestic economy by limiting state intervention.

Lack of data

It is difficult to measure the impact such a decision has had and will continue to have on the market. In 2020, Novastan attempted to obtain information locally but very few people were willing to talk about it. In fact, the lack of transparency and the strained context surrounding the negotiations over the last few weeks meant the fishermen of Muynaq did not wish to comment.

Only the press office of the Antimonopoly Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan agreed to answer Novastan’s questions, stressing the importance artemia represents for the country. The head of its press service, Manzura Khasanova, said that data regarding the selling price and volume of export of artemia and industry wages did not exist. As for the land and sea portions where artemia is collected, they are under the supervision of the State Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan for Geology and Mineral Resources.

Although instinctively artemia collection doesn’t seem to be a very sensitive industry, it remains opaque and very closed off in Uzbekistan. The only available data come from the international trade association Global Aquaculture Alliance, which ranked Uzbekistan among the world’s leading suppliers of artemia in 2017, with over 20 tons produced per year.

From the Uzbek side, little information is available to the public. Muynaq-based producers created an association in 2018 to lobby for transparency as well as promote export, but without providing much more detail so far.

The fishermen of Muynaq have been gathering, processing and selling artemia larvae since the early 2000s, when the world’s demand totalled 2,000 tons per year, according to scientific research. A small shellfish, then, but a major economic lifeline for the fishermen of Muynaq.

Malaurie Le Bail
Novastan.org

Translated from French by Manon Montant

Edited by Alice Coveney

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Children playing football on a street in Moynaq. Until a few years ago, this town in Karakalpakistan, an autonomous republic in western Uzbekistan, was still located on the shore of the Aral Sea.

Credit: Timur Karpov (Uzbekistan)

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