Why the Aral Sea’s Restoration Matters Beyond Central Asia

The Aral Sea’s fragile revival offers a rare note of hope in a warming world

By: Askhat Orazbay

Few environmental disasters illustrate the consequences of human mismanagement as starkly as the fate of the Aral Sea. Once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, it has lost roughly 90 percent of its volume since the 1960s after the main flow of the rivers that sustained it were diverted for large-scale irrigation projects. …