The collapse of the Aral Sea is one of the best-documented environmental disasters of the modern era. In the early 1960s it was the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, covering 67,500 square kilometres. Large-scale diversions from the Syr Darya and Amu Darya to irrigate cotton, rice, and other crops across Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan drained it within a generation. From the 1960s on, the sea broke into separate water bodies — broadly, the Small Aral (Northern) and the Great Aral (Southern) — and from there their fates diverged completely.
Most of the Great Aral is now salt desert; full restoration of the whole sea was recognised early on as unachievable. The Small Aral was different. It was saved — first by emergency dams, then by the World Bank–backed Kokaral Dam of 2005 — and Kazakhstan is now moving to consolidate that gain on three fronts: a second phase of dam works to raise the sea further, large-scale afforestation of the exposed bed, and water-sharing diplomacy with its upstream neighbours. Each of those efforts runs up against the same pressure — a Syr Darya whose flow is falling, with a new generation of upstream reservoirs poised to take more.
The sea continued shrinking through the 2000s, as imagery from NASA's Terra satellite documented. By 1989–1990, it had fully separated into the Great Aral and the Small Aral. The Small Aral kept receiving the Syr Darya's flow, while the Amu Darya stopped reaching the sea in the mid-1980s, sealing the fate of the Great Aral. Full restoration of the entire sea was recognized early on as unachievable in any foreseeable timeframe. But in the smaller northern basin, the water level has been rising since the early 1990s, driven by a positive balance between Syr Darya inflow and evaporative loss. That balance is the entire basis of the effort to save the Small Aral — and it is exactly what new upstream water use now threatens.
Not everything happening to the sea in those years was visible in satellite imagery or scientific papers. I recall the mid-1990s, when our office in Almaty was periodically visited by Zhannat Makhambetova, then head of the NGO Aral Tenizi, which supports fishermen in the Kazakh town of Aralsk. On each visit, she spoke with despair about a sea going lifeless and a fishing industry disappearing. By then, the only fish surviving in the Aral was the European flounder (Platichthys flesus); other species could not tolerate the rising salinity. In the Small Aral, salinity peaked at 30 grams per liter in the early 1990s, against 10 grams per litre in the 1960s — the product of falling water levels and evaporation.
Before the disaster, mid-century catches ran to several tens of thousands of tonnes a year, and the fishery employed roughly 60,000 people. The sea held 36 fish species, including 20 native ones; Soviet-era programs introduced a further 16 from other waters with mixed results. Most native and introduced freshwater fish died off once salinity reached 18 grams per liter in the 1980s. Commercial fishing effectively ceased in the mid-1990s, with catches falling to a few dozen tons a year — a thousandfold collapse.
In the late 1990s, the flounder offered a reprieve. Introduced from the Sea of Azov between 1979 and 1987, this salt-tolerant flatfish supported a catch exceeding 1,000 tons in 1999 and nearly 2,000 tonnes by 2007, becoming an unlikely symbol of hope for Aralsk's fishermen for two decades. As the Small Aral freshened after 2006, flounder ceased to be the dominant commercial species, giving way to freshwater zander, bream, carp, catfish, roach, perch, and pike. Between 2015 and 2023, catches averaged around 7,000 tons a year, most of it exported to Russia and Europe.
The recovery rested on engineering. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the level was raised and salinity cut by damming the former strait between the northern and southern basins and holding water in the Small Aral. The first structure, built in August 1992 from sand and reeds, required repeated repair, including reinforced-concrete work; in April 1999, a rise of more than three meters destroyed it outright. According to a World Bank report, the failure drove another sharp decline, with the 2004 catch falling to just 52 tons. The Small Aral was again under threat until the 12-kilometer Kokaral Dam was completed in August 2005 under the World Bank–financed Syr Darya Control and Northern Aral Sea Project (Phase I). The 2010 World Bank Implementation Status Results Report records the payoff: the level rose four meters; the shoreline advanced to within 35 kilometers of Aralsk by 2010, against 75 kilometres in 2001; the surface area grew to 3,300 square kilometers in 2009, from 2,400 in 2001; and salinity fell to under 10 grams per liter by August 2010, less than half its 2001 level.
The rescue has not only held but advanced. Over the past three years, coordinated releases along the Syr Darya channeled more than five billion cubic meters into the Northern Aral — a record 2.6 billion in 2024 alone — lifting its volume to roughly 23 billion cubic meters, a level the government's own Water Resources Management Concept had not expected to reach until the end of the decade. Volume is up some 42 percent over the period, and salinity has fallen close to fourfold.
Astana now intends to build on that. Under Phase II, again with World Bank support, the government plans to reconstruct the Kokaral Dam, raising it by two meters, and to add a new hydraulic facility near the village of Amanotkel to stabilize the Akshatau and Kamystybas lake systems. The works are designed to lift the Northern Aral's level to 44 meters (Baltic system), expand its surface to 3,913 square kilometers, and increase its volume from 23 to 34 cubic kilometers. A feasibility study has been prepared, completion is targeted for 2026–2029, and Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov has instructed the water ministry to secure financing by the end of 2026; refilling to the new level is expected to take four to five years.
The harder part of the effort is diplomatic rather than engineering. The Northern Aral's recovery depends entirely on what reaches it down the Syr Darya, and that flow is governed upstream by Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and above all Uzbekistan, which consumes the bulk of the river's usable water. The recent inflow gains were possible only through coordinated reservoir operation across the basin and adherence to interstate allocation agreements. In a notable step, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan last year signed an agreement on the joint management and rational use of transboundary water bodies — the institutional foundation on which any further recovery of the Small Aral now rests.
Yet that foundation is shifting. Alarming reports are again emerging from the Kazakh side of the Aral. Local reporting describes the Small Aral drying, water turning saltier, and catches falling, by some accounts to around 4,000 tons a year over the past two years, even as the Ministry of Water Resources reports annual catches near 8,000 tons. The discrepancy itself is telling: aggregate official figures and the lived experience of specific fishing communities are diverging. The deeper pressure is not in dispute. The Syr Darya's flow has fallen sharply since 2019, and the Institute of Geography and Water Security forecasts a further reduction of two cubic kilometers in the Aral–Syr Darya basin by 2030. The planned Kambarata-1 hydropower plant compounds the risk: its reservoir on the Naryn, the Syr Darya's largest tributary, would hold roughly 4.56 cubic kilometers and further constrain downstream flow through 2030 and beyond. The same coordinated diplomacy that refilled the sea will now have to defend it against more reservoirs and less water — a far harder task than building a dam.
While the north was saved, the bulk of the sea — 54,000 to 57,000 square kilometерs depending on the year, of which roughly 20,000 lie in Kazakhstan — became a salt desert. Salt had accumulated in the Aral over millions of years; for four to five decades, fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides drained into it from irrigated farmland. As the water retreated, these settled onto the exposed bed. Estimates put 107 to 114 billion tons of salt on the dried seabed. Each year, winds lift up to 80 million tons of salt and chemicals from the Aralkum, carrying them across Central Asia and, in documented cases, as far as the glaciers of the Tien Shan and the Himalayas, harming human health, ecosystems, and farmland. The Aralkum has become a leading regional source of dust storms and long-range pollutant transport.
Efforts to halt desertification on the dried bed date to 1980, when planting in the drained Rybatsky and Moinak bays in Uzbekistan proved effective. Uzbekistan continued planting shrubs through the mid-2010s across more than 3,500 square kilometers. Since the late 2010s, both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have pursued large-scale green belts to arrest desertification and transboundary dust transport. Between 2018 and 2025, Uzbekistan worked across roughly 20,000 square kilometers; between 2021 and 2025, Kazakhstan planted some 11,000 square kilometers. The species used include saxaul (Haloxylon), Richter's saltwort (Xylosalsola richteri), Calligonum caput-medusae Schrenk, and tamarisk (Tamarix). Together these plantings now cover more than half the dried bed — though area planted is not the same as area stabilized: Kazakh authorities put saxaul survival at around 30 percent, and it remains premature to judge the green belts' durability.
The Aral disaster ranks among the gravest environmental challenges Central Asia faces, and arguably one of the gravest anywhere. Much of the sea is gone, and its communities have endured decades of hardship. The north survives — but its future, including the fishery and the coastal economy that depends on it, now turns on a single variable the rescue cannot control: how much of the Syr Darya reaches it. Climate change and a new generation of upstream reservoirs are both pulling that number down. The lesson of the Small Aral is not that the sea was saved, but that the saving is conditional and reversible — a gain that must be defended upstream, in water-sharing agreements and reservoir-operating rules, or lost again. The first rescue bought time. Whether the region uses it will be decided on the Naryn and the Syr Darya, not at Kokaral.
Vadim Ni is an environmental lawyer and the Director of the Socio-Ecological Fund in Almaty, Kazakhstan.