Chinese and Uzbek scientists have made progress in restoring the Aral Sea
The Aral Sea, once the fourth largest lake in the world, has lost more than 90 per cent of its area since the 1960s. In recent years, Chinese and Uzbek scientists have been cooperating to restore its ecosystem and have achieved promising results.
The Aral Sea covered about 66,000 square kilometres until Soviet irrigation projects diverted its two feeder rivers, mainly for cotton cultivation, and the water began to disappear. "The Aral Sea began to dry up in the early 1960s. Unfortunately, today it is impossible to refill this lake," said Abdurashid Myrzambetov, Deputy Director of the International Innovation Centre for the Aral Sea in Nukus. Today, about 90 per cent of the sea has disappeared, leaving ships in a new desert called the Aralkum. The damage extends far beyond the former shoreline, as winds lift salt and toxic agricultural waste from the seabed, causing dust storms that can carry pollutants hundreds of kilometres.
In Xinjiang, 1,500 kilometres from Nukus, the situation is strikingly similar. Xinjiang accounts for more than 40 per cent of China's total saline and alkaline land. For decades, scientists there have been battling salt, studying which soils can be restored and which plants can survive. "Everything here is covered in salt. Look, you can see that it is mainly salt crusts. To grow anything here, you first need to understand the characteristics of saline and alkaline land. We have to go out into the wild fields to collect samples," says Tian Changyan, a senior researcher at the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). "Let me show you saltwort. This plant is truly impressive, it is extremely salt‑tolerant. Taste it. It is very salty because it can absorb salt," says Tian.
Tasting salt‑tolerant plants has become a routine practice for scientists in their work. Through repeated experiments, they found that plants able to survive in Xinjiang's saline alkaline soils also grow in the Aral Sea basin in Uzbekistan. Since 2018, researchers from the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography have been travelling between China and Uzbekistan. They have delivered more than 1.3 tonnes of salt‑tolerant plant seeds to the shores of the Aral Sea. "In the initial stage, we provided 36 species that were tested under these conditions. Based on the plants we provided, the scale of research can be expanded. The ability to excrete salt allows the plant to adapt to saline alkaline conditions," said Zhao Zhengyong, another researcher from the Xinjiang Institute. Among these species are salt‑accumulating ones such as Salicornia, salt‑excreting ones such as Limonium and Tamarix, and salt‑repelling ones such as reeds. According to Zhao, each of these plays a unique role in soil restoration and dust storm prevention.
To reduce soil salinity and restore vegetation, another task is to reduce water consumption for cotton — a crop that requires abundant irrigation and was the primary cause of the Aral Sea's desiccation. "Today, cotton is irrigated from underground using a drip irrigation system recently introduced in China. This reduces water consumption by about 40–50 per cent," says Timur Toreshov, a researcher at the Plant Physiology and Biotechnology Laboratory of the International Innovation Centre for the Aral Sea in Nukus. From advanced agricultural machinery and precision drip irrigation to modern high‑precision equipment, China's experience and knowledge in cotton production are being applied in Uzbekistan.
The results are visible. Saline dust storms have weakened. Cotton yields have tripled thanks to drip irrigation. And a green area of more than two million hectares is gradually being restored in the basin. "Seeds are our carriers. Once there, they will not just germinate and turn into new life. They also embody China's vision of creating a beautiful, green and sustainable environment across the region," said Zhang Yuanming, Director of the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography.
As CCTV+ reports, China‑Uzbekistan cooperation in restoring the Aral Sea is an example of how science and international cooperation can give a second chance even to the most devastated ecosystems. Successes in combating salinisation, reducing water consumption and bringing greenery back to the region offer hope that the Aral Sea will not disappear forever, and that its basin will become a symbol of revival and sustainable development. In the coming years, this cooperation is expected to expand, strengthening environmental security across Central Asia.
