Bulldozers busy at work constructing the Turkmen Lake (picture taken from the website Turkmenistan: the Golden Age: www.turkmenistan.gov.tm)

 

 

   Work on the Golden Age Lake has been underway since 2000 and it would be a magnified version of a just-completed, smaller Archabil reservoir near Ashgabat, the Turkmen capital.

   The Archabil reservoir spreads across five hectares and holds 300,000 cubic metres of run off or drainage and is said to be the “prototype” for the larger lake Turkmenistan is building in the Karakum Desert.

   Ecologists say runoff collected by the recently completed Archabil (with a price tag of 5 million U.S. dollars) is the reason for the toxic fumes that waft in its surroundings, and another one many times its size could be devastating.

   The planned Golden Age Lake – also known as the Turkmen Lake – is to spread across 3,460 square kilometres in the Karakum Desert in north-western Turkmenistan.

   The idea is to collect drainage from irrigated fields in four Turkmen provinces of Lebap, Mary, Dashoguz and Ahal, and channel the water for collection in the Karashor depression.

   The proposed giant lake in the Uzbek neighbourhood is to hold 132 billion cubic metres of water and cost anywhere between 4.5 to nine billion US dollars.

   Turkmen authorities say when completed in 2009, the lake would receive up to 10 billion cubic metres of water lost through irrigation every year and would help to reduce water logging and land degradation.

   Water used for irrigation now seeps into the highly porous desert and low lying areas adjacent to the fields and is often lost.

   Turkmen authorities say building the lake would help to reuse the runoff and at the same time improve water quality in the Amu Darya – the largest river in Central Asia

   Experts say the roughly eight billion cubic metres of drainage – often polluted with chemicals used for agriculture – that enters the Amu Darya every year is also the reason for salinity and land degradation downstream.

   “The quality of the Amu Darya’s water will improve but its volume will decrease,” says Usman Buranov, technical director of the Tashkent-based Agency for Implementation of the Aral Sea Basin Projects.

   The roughly 68.1 billion cubic metres of water in the Amu Darya is used by five countries – Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan (Turkmenistan’s share is 21.4 billion cubic metres).

   The giant lake would therefore reduce the volume of the river and ultimately of the Aral Sea where the water has already shrunk by about 90 percent to about 115 billion cubic metres.

   The Golden Age Lake wins only a “momentary reprieve (for) irrigated lands, but it could hardly be considered as a ‘nature protection measure,’ since the pollution (is) not eliminated, but replaced from one area to another,” Israeli researchers Nikolai Orlovsky and Leah Orlovsky say in an article titled, “Water resources of Turkmenistan: Use and Conservation.”

 

   The two add that the technology to be used for building the 720-kilometre Trans-Turkmen Collector canal that would take water to the lake is “primitive” because “filtration measures” have not been envisaged.

   They also warn that the cost of infrastructure and necessary nature protection measures could make the project uneconomical.

   Almost 90 percent of Turkmenistan is desert and the high temperatures in summer could also cause high loss of water due to evaporation.

   Uzbek authorities are wary about the mega project and Vadim Antonov, technical director of the Vodproekt association of the Uzbek Ministry of Agriculture and Water Industry, compares it with large construction projects of the Joseph Stalin era that had more “prestige” value rather than environmental soundness or cost effectiveness.

   Abdolhamid Amirebrahimi, Interim Secretary of the Regional Centre for Central and West Asia based in Ramsar, Iran, told the AWW that he is “shocked by the news about the construction of such a huge manmade body of water.”

   He adds, “Extreme care must be taken in creating a structure which never existed because the ecological balance will then be at risk.”

   However, these arguments do not seem to deter the Turkmen president Saparmurat Niyazov from going ahead with the project.

   “The problem of water scarcity which appeared many years ago has been aggravated since Niyazov came to power (in 1985),” Nurgozel Bayramova, a columnist for the Turkmen opposition website Gundogar, told the AWW.

   Water shortage is acute in Turkmenistan, not only in rural areas but also in the major cities, including the capital Ashgabat.

   Adds Bayramova: “the Golden Age Lake will not solve the problems, but it can result in severe ecological imbalance, bio-spherical and climatic changes.”  

(END/AWW/IPSAP/MK/BB/FS/050606)