Water Level of Armenia’s Lake Sevan Falling Rapidly Threatening Economy and Population

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 12 – Lake Sevan, Armenia’s largest lake, has seen its water level decline by 10 centimeters, almost four inches, over the last year, the result of the drying up of many of the smaller rivers that feed it as a result of climate change and the increasing use by the population of water from its largest tributary, the Razdan River.

            The decline in water level means that coastlines have now advanced into the lake and are leading to a situation like that earlier in the Aral Sea where the former unified body of water divided into two, something that could eventually happen to Lake Sevan (vpoanalytics.com/point-of-view/armeniya-problemy-meleyushchego-sevana-sudorozhnymi-metaniyami-ne-reshit/).

            At the end of Soviet times, some in Yerevan and Moscow called for measures to be taken, but these were first postponed because experts said that the declining water levels then might soon be reversed and then cancelled as a result of the war over Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

            Now, the Armenian government is struggling to come up with a program to save the lake, hopeful that it can reduce usage of water from it and dredge some of the rivers that now dry up completely during the summer months and thus do not provide the water flow that had kept the level of the lake where it had been.

            But those measures are both difficult and expensive, and so Armenia now faces many of the same water problems that the countries of Central Asia and those in the Caspian basin do, without the time or funds necessary to correct the situation before irreversible disaster sets in and leads to the death of Savan.