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<Forum on the Caspian, Aral and Dead Seas-Perspective
of Water Environmental Management and Politics>

<Symposium on the Aral Sea and The Surrounding Region
-Irrigated Agriculture and the Environment>

ABSTRACT

Creeping Environmental Phenomena in the Aral Sea Basin

Michael H. Glantz
Environmental and Societal Impacts Group,
National Center for Atmospheric Research¹ Boulder, Colorado, USA

The shrinking of the Aral Sea in Central Asia has captured the attention and interest of governments and environment and development organizations around the globe. It has been considered a quiet catastrophe, one that has evolved over the past few decades. While the shrinkage of the Sea has captured the major share of attention with regard to environmental problems in the Aral basin, closer scrutiny of the region highlights several other "quiet" adverse changes to the environment in the basin and to the populations that depend on it. This paper attempts to draw attention to the general notion of creeping environmental phenomena and societal responses to them, and to apply that notion to environmental changes in the Aral Sea basin. While societies respond relatively quickly to crises, they have much more difficulty in developing ways to cope effectively with slow-onset, low-grade change.

Throughout the first 20 years of the Aral Sea problem (1960-1980), signs of slow-onset, long-term and cumulative environmental change were appearing everywhere; salt-laden dust storms, destroyed fish spawning grounds, secondary salinization, increased salinity of sea water, waterlogging, the likely division of the sea into separate parts, the loss of wildlife in the littoral areas, the large reduction of streamflow from the two main tributaries, a change in the regional climate, and so forth. Each one of these adverse changes had been mentioned in the Soviet scientific literature in the 1960s and 1970s. The Aral Sea crisis has become acknowledged as one of the major human- induced environmental degradations of the twentieth century.

While we already possess a considerable amount of information about the Aral basin and the various physical processes of change and degradation, it will be very important and useful to focus research on an identification and analysis of the various thresholds for awareness of and responses to each of these creeping environmental changes. The findings of such research can be used to identify better coping mechanisms for existing creeping environmental phenomena, to avert their future development in the region, and can be used to improve political as well as societal responses to creeping environmental phenomena, not only in the Aral basin, but elsewhere on the globe as well.

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¹The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by the National Science Foundation

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