Transfer of flood waters of the Ishim River through the Torgai River to the Aral Sea. The river is subject to regular floods, which leads to the destruction of the banks and water pollution.
Dear friends,
We are pleased to announce the launch of the ICABER‑FM charitable foundation (International Caspian‑Aral Basin Ecosystem Revival and Flood Mitigation Fund), established to save the ecosystems of the Caspian and Aral basins and to minimise the consequences of floods in the region.
Founder of the Fund
Zhanbolat Nadyrov
Our projects
Flood Damage Mitigation: Protecting Lives, Preserving Property and Building Resilience
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How did the idea of the Fund come about?
In the early 2000s, the founder visited his native land – the south of the Kazakh Uplands, near Zhezkazgan. Once-flourishing pastures had turned into takyr, a barren clay desert. The cause was the dried-up Aral Sea: every year winds lift up to 80 million tonnes of toxic salts from the bed of the dead sea.
Before it began to shrink, the Aral Sea was the fourth-largest lake in the world.
Its level has been falling since 1960 because of the expansion of irrigation. The Amu Darya, one of the two largest rivers of Central Asia, no longer reaches the sea at all. The region’s demand for water has grown from 60 to 120 km³ a year, and water is still used inefficiently.
The disappearance of the Aral Sea is one of the most devastating man-made disasters in world history: rusting hulks of ships and salt flats stretching to the horizon where waves once rolled.
The drying of the sea has had a critical impact on the region’s climate. Up to 100 km from the former shoreline the weather has become more continental, with drier and hotter summers and colder, longer winters. Winds carry large amounts of dust containing sea salts, pesticides and other chemicals from the exposed seabed to neighbouring areas. The scale of the disaster can be seen in the satellite images below:
Dynamics of the Aral Sea
| Year | Water level, m | Volume, km³ | Surface area, km² | Salinity, ‰ | Inflow, km³/year |
| 1960 | 53.40 | 1,083.00 | 68,900 | 9.90 | 63.00 |
| 2003 | 31.00 | 112.80 | 18,240 | 78.00 | 3.2 |
| 2021 | 10 | 44.2 | 3,300 | 10 | 1.82 |
Scientists proposed solving the Aral problem by replacing water-intensive crops with drought-resistant ones, but this did not suit the leaders of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, who instead planned to expand the area under cotton grown for export.
Kazakhstan therefore cannot count on water from other Central Asian countries.
Russia, too, back in 2021 “officially informed that it was inexpedient to consider transferring the flow of surplus rivers to the territory of Kazakhstan”. This was stated by the Prime Minister of Kazakhstan Alikhan Smailov in reply to a parliamentary inquiry about establishing a separate Kazakhstan–Russia intergovernmental commission on diverting part of the flow of Siberian rivers to Kazakhstan and Central Asia because of the region’s water shortage.
This means the problem has to be solved using the country’s own internal resources.
At the same time, floods in Kazakhstan claim 390 lives a year, and average annual flood losses are estimated at USD 419 million.
The solution is to build reservoirs that capture as much floodwater as possible and divert it to the Aral Sea.