Turkmenistan's Desert Lake – An exercise in folly, a threat to Central Asian stability
Many are already familiar with the catastrophic decline of the Aral Sea the past forty years. Once the world’s fourth-largest saltwater lake, pollution and the Soviet Union’s redirection of rivers that once fed it have shrunk the Aral Sea to less than 10% of its original size.
The Aral Sea disaster – and the complete failure of the Soviet irrigation programs that caused it – has been widely documented in recent years. It thus comes as something of a surprise that Turkmenistan’s new president, Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, is moving forward to create an artificial lake in the middle of the Karakum Desert.
President Berdymukhamedov says the “Golden Age Lake” will provide Turkmenistan with water security and support environmental conservation efforts. The lake will be filled by drainage water channeled from cotton fields (cotton accounts for half of Turkmen agricultural production) across thousands of kilometers of desert.
While government officials heap praise on the scheme, it seems clear that filling a hole in the middle of a desert with water will not be a sustainable solution to Turkmenistan’s irrigation problems. In fact, it will likely further degrade soil and strain water resources. BBC reports:
Environmentalists say a lot of the water will simply disappear into the desert’s permeable soil. Large amounts, they say, will also evaporate in the high temperatures, leaving the soil extremely salty… Analysts fear that Turkmenistan might be tempted to help fill the new lake with fresh water from the Amu Darya, a river on the Uzbek border, which Uzbekistan relies on for irrigation. This, they say, could start a war.
Salinated soil, wasted freshwater and risk of war – Turkmenistan’s Stalinist-quixotic Golden Age Lake is yet another example of the dire threats climate change poses to international security, and the desperate measures water-strapped countries will take – are taking – to maximize what few resources they have.
