Paul Goble
Staunton, July 2 – Central Asian countries can do little on their own to combat the impact of climate change on the availability of water and cannot get more water from each other or their neighbors all of whom are suffering from shortages and so must focus their efforts on modernizing pipeline and irrigation infrastructure, Azamat Kausov says.
A specialist on water issues at Kazakhstan’s Regional Environmental Center for Central Asia, he says that this will be enormously expensive but is absolutely necessary to avert a crisis that will otherwise become a humanitarian disaster and a threat to national security (time.kz/articles/territory/2026/07/02/nado-lezt-v-butylku).
Up to now, Kausov says, the countries of Central Asia have sought to blame climate change because that is beyond their ability to change or to engage in constant negotiations on the sharing of water from one to another. But now the situation has deteriorated to the point that neither strategy will work.
Instead, they must modernize their national pipeline and irrigation systems, many of which date to Soviet times, so that their countries That will be expensive; and it means that the cost of water will have to rise as well as regulation of how water is used not only in agriculture and industry but by the population.
Right now, he continues, some in these countries are opposing such steps on populist grounds and because the melting of glaciers means that water flows have increased in some places in recent years. But those increases are temporary. When the glaciers disappear, the flows of the rivers they feed will collapse and do so suddenly.
If Central Asia is not to avoid such disasters, its governments and peoples must face up both to the problems in the water supply and their own need to invest in projects to solve those problems before they get worse. If they don’t, the disasters ahead will spring on them in ways that they are unlikely to be able to cope with.
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