DUSHANBE, 2 September 2003 — A UN-sponsored forum in the Central Asian republic of Tajikistan resolved yesterday to boost cooperation between countries sharing common river basins to try to prevent crises such as the continuing disappearance of the Aral Sea.
“Countries should share knowledge, experience and technologies for the rational and effective use of water resources,” the 50-country forum agreed in a written resolution after three days of meetings in the Tajik capital.
“Countries sharing the same river basin should work jointly to protect and utilize this common resource to improve the economic and social wellbeing of all people living in these basins,” it added.
The key-note event in the United Nations’ Year of Fresh Water focused on desertification and environmental degradation in the ex-Soviet Central Asian republics and tensions between mountainous water-rich Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and their low-lying cotton-growing neighbors Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
The drying of the Aral Sea, which spans Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, has already left a 400,000-square-kilometre toxic wasteland threatening some three million local residents and caused the sea to subdivide into two.
Help from international institutions such as the World Bank is vital to solving such problems, Tajik President Emomali Rakhmonov told delegates. “In such a vital area of importance as the water sector no one can deal single-handedly with the emerging multi-faceted challenges and risks,” Rakhmonov said.
But a number of delegates expressed doubts about the likelihood of the region’s authoritarian leaders resolving their differences and noted the relative lack of high-level decision makers from some Central Asian states including Turkmenistan at the forum.
There were also doubts about governments’ acceptance of the need emphasized by several experts for public involvement in decision-making over water management.
Rakhmonov appeared to reflect a traditionally Soviet view of the media as transmitting government policy rather than being a forum for debate, referring in his closing speech to the role of mass media in dissemination of information and “encouraging actions.”
But others were convinced that the forum, at which hundreds of fountains splashed constantly throughout the city, had drawn international attention and expertise to a region with a reputation in the West for terrorism and instability.
“Tajikistan has put itself on the map, there’s a lot of donor interest,” John Soussan, a consultant for the Stockholm Environment Institute said. “With the world’s attention turned to security issues it’s been very hard to get attention to development issues, but without it things are only going to get worse,” he said.
The UN’s new World Water Development Report estimated that some 2.2 million people around the world died due to water-related diseases last year. Partly due to global warming, well over two billion people will be suffering from water scarcity by the middle of this century, the report warned.
