WHAT USED TO BE THE ARAL SEABED (Asia Water Wire) -- Forty years ago, the depth of the site in the Aral Sea where workers are now planting forests as part of a joint German-Uzbek project was more than 20 metres. To get there, one needs to drive through 70 kilometres of scorched sand strewn with seashells. This, after all, used to be the seabed. 

   But the areas where the environmental damage and desertification around the shrunken Aral Sea is most evident is today also the site of attempts to ease their negative impact. Workers are busy planting shrubs that can survive in this kind of hostile setting, ease erosion and create forests of sorts that improve the climate, landscape -- and hopefully, the overall environment as well.

    "Man-made desertification happens and man suffers from it," Zinovy Novitsky, the project's scientific adviser, told Asia Water Wire. Working on the dried bottom of the Aral for 20 years, he defended his doctoral thesis on the scientific methods of growing forests on the former sea bottom.

    So far, workers have planted the former bottom in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan 27,000 hectares with shrubs, bushes and fodder plants, including the black saxaul, or Haloxylon aphyllum (ranging in size from a large shrub to a small tree), Salsola richteri and Calligonum caput-medusae.

   Furthermore, Novitsky adds: "Forests create oxygen, kill microbes, improve climate and landscape."

    The roots of the shrubs grow parallel to the ground and fasten to the mix of sand, dust and salt. The parts growing above ground prevent erosion and can help act as windbreakers, decreasing velocity on the surface by 60 percent to 70 percent.

   This is of no small import. In the Aral region, blowing salt and dust cause, along with other factors, cancer, respiratory diseases, intestinal disorders and infections. The average life expectancy in the region is 59.5 years.

    The new shrubs, bushes and plants capture rain and snow that are crucial in the drought-affected Aral region, whose current annual precipitation averages only about 75 millimetres.

   

The Aral is an inland sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, to the east of the Caspian Sea. At one time, it was the world's fourth largest inland body of water after the Caspian Sea between Europe and Asia, Lake Superior in North America and Lake Victoria in Africa. It started to dry up in the 1960s as a result of human activity, when huge amounts of its water were used for irrigation of cotton.

    During the 1960s, nearly 58 billion cubic metres of water flowed from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers into the Aral each year. But it has been receiving very little water since 1986 due to irrigation offtake. It also loses 30 to 35-billion cu m a year to evaporation.

    As a result of these factors, the Aral's volume of water has fallen by 90 percent -- to 115 billion cubic metres -- and its surface area has shrunk by 73 percent -- to 17.6 thousand square kilometres. The Aral also has separated into two lakes, called the Big Aral and the Small Aral.

   Nearly 50,000 square kilometres of its former bottom have dried up, and a new desert called Aralkum has arisen. Winds blow about 75 million tonnes of dust, sand and salt from it into the atmosphere every year, all of which settles on land within a 1,000-kilometre radius.

    The situation has been aggravated by the uninhabited Vozrozhdeniye island, a former biological weapons test site of the former Soviet Union. The island has become a peninsula that is shared by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

    Novitsky estimates about 600,000 hectares in the dry Aral region should be covered with woods, but adds it would be difficult to plant such a large area. Instead, workers can plant 250,000 to 300,000 hectares over 10 years and after five to six years, the shrubs will start to produce seeds that will be spread by the wind, he explains.

    But some of the area is unfit for planting because the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers carried chemicals that kill plants and insects to the Aral in large quantities. Those areas still contain unsafe amounts of the chemicals.

    The black saxaul is grown from seedlings produced in tree nurseries. Two nurseries with a total area of 50 hectares have been laid out this year, Sabir Kalenov, the project’s technical officer, told AWW.

    Some seedlings are a pink colour – chlorophyll has been destroyed by the high salt content in the soil, says Novitsky. These seedlings, however, better acclimatise to what used to be the bottom of the Aral Sea.  

    The workers planting the forests live in a camp, 41 kilometres away from the Aral’s former shore, where the sea’s depth once reached 17 metres.  They live in barracks, in rather harsh conditions, where watching television is the only entertainment in the evening.

    The workers earn 70 to 80 U.S. dollars a month, which is slightly more than the poverty line of  60 dollars per person per month, according to Uzbek authorities.  Still, these earnings are considered comparatively highly given that the region that has suffered from economic collapse after the shrinkage of the sea. Monthly earnings of 15 or 20 dollars are not uncommon in the area around the Aral Sea.

   

“The living conditions here are normal but I’d like for them to be good,” Ruslan Bekmurzaev, a 21 year-old worker from a village in the Moynaq district of the republic of Karakalpakstan (part of Uzbekistan), said in an interview.

    Bekmurzaev works 22 days on the former bottom of the Aral Sea and spends the rest of the month in his home with his parents, sister and two brothers. He has worked for the project for three years and now has problems with his eyes. “It is difficult to work on the former bottom because of blowing sand that gets into eyes,” he says. “I have to see an oculist about it every two months.”

    But “we want to improve the ecology of the region. I live near the Aral and I must work here,” he adds.

   The project was started by the German Society for Technical Cooperation in 2000. The German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development allocated financial resources, says Dr Hans Wilps, project leader.

   This planting project is much cheaper than other possible solutions, experts say.

    Also, the costs for forestation in Uzbekistan -- 150 to 200 dollars per hectare – “lie substantially below the generally prevailing costs of 500 to 700 U.S. dollars per hectare (in the world),” Wilps and Novitsky say in a brochure titled, ‘The Aral Sea Disaster: A New Approach Towards Its Overcoming Through Recultivation Measures. Report on a Project’s History – Present – Future’.

    Muses Vadim Antonov, the technical director of the Vodproekt association of the Uzbek Ministry of Agriculture and Water Industry: “It is impossible to restore the Aral, but it is necessary to make the area healthier." (END/AWW/IPSAP/MK/JS/140706)