Kazakhstan’s Kokaral Dam was built to trap water and save the North Aral Sea. Screenshot from the video “The Aral Sea: the history of big water!” from Открывая Казахстан YouTube channel. Fair use.
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Over the last 20 years, Kazakhstan managed to resurrect the Small Aral Sea, a.k.a. the North Aral, a small part of the Aral Sea, which once was the fourth largest lake in the world, bustling with life and abundance.
Situated between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Aral Sea fell victim to the Soviet Union’s agricultural policies. In the 1960s, when both nations were part of the Soviet Bloc, officials began cultivating vast stretches of barren land in Central Asia by diverting water from the two main rivers that fed the Aral Sea: the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya.
Without water from them, more than 90 percent of the lake’s surface area dried up, turning the sea into the Aralkum Desert, filled with toxic pesticides and fertilizers washed down from the cotton fields.
After years of restoration efforts, the North Aral, located on the Kazakh side of the dried-up sea, has become an astounding success story in reversing one of the worst anthropogenic environmental disasters in world history.
Health and environmental consequences
The consequences of draining such a colossal body of water were devastating and continue to affect the population of regions around the sea and beyond. It significantly affected the climate, manifesting in unbearably hot summers and harsh frosts in winter.
The residents of the Aral Sea region were hit hardest. In the late 1990s, the child mortality rate in the region was the highest in the world, and the situation remains dire. Every year, storms disperse 80 million tons of toxic sand and salt from the lake bed, which poisons the population, leading to a myriad of chronic and deadly diseases.
NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites have been documenting the diminishing of the Aral Sea since 2000. Image from NASA Goddard Photo and Video. License: CC BY 2.0
Various regional studies found toxic substances, insecticides, and dangerous pesticides in the blood and urine of adults and children, and even in the milk of nursing mothers. Adults and children in the region often suffer from anemia, cancer, kidney disease, and epidemic-spreading tuberculosis.
Economically, the drying up of the sea killed off the finishing industry, one of the main sources of livelihood and food for locals. Until the 1960s, the annual fish catch amounted to 80 thousand tons, making the Aral Sea by far the largest fishery basin in Central Asia.
Read more: China is helping Uzbekistan save the Aral Sea
In addition to fish, which all disappeared from the sea due to increased salinity, the Aral Sea disaster also led to the extinction or endangerment of dozens of mammals, birds, and plants in the area.
Save a small part or lose all of it?
By the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union fell and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan became independent, the Aral Sea stopped existing as a single body of water. It was divided into the “Big” Aral on the southern Uzbek side, fed by Amu Darya, and the “Small” Aral on the northern Kazakh side, fed by Syr Darya.
Connecting these two bodies of water was a narrow channel, which ran from the Kazakh city of Aralsk to the largest biological weapon testing site in the world, built by the Soviet Union on the so-called Vozrozhdenie Island, located in the Big Aral.
Uzbekistan failed to direct water from the Amu Darya, which originally fed 70 percent of the water to the sea. Consequently, the Big Aral became an evaporating pot for the water coming from the Syr Darya as well, which trickled down from the north, pushing Kazakhstan to prioritize saving the North Aral.
Put simply, there was not enough water to save the entire sea.
Thus, in 2005, Kazakhstan built the Kokaral Dam to trap water flowing from the Syr Darya and save the North Aral. Stretching 13 kilometers, the dam was built with the financial support of the World Bank.
By the time the dam was built, there were no fish left in the North Aral, and the shoreline had retracted 40 kilometers away from Aralsk, a former port town. In addition to building the dam, the authorities also modernized the irrigation and water distribution system to increase the flow capacity of the Syr Darya and save water for the North Aral.
Parts of the Aral Sea, a once-expansive body of water between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, have dried up, leaving boats grounded and the region desertified. Image from Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0
The results have been an astounding success. In 2025, the total volume of water in the North Aral increased by 42 percent and reached 27 billion cubic meters. This helped to decrease the salinity level by four times and reclaim 870 square kilometers of previously dried up sea bed.
Here is a YouTube video about the resurrection of the North Aral.
Environmentalists also reintroduced fish to the sea — so successfully that the annual catch reached 8,000 tons, reviving the fishing industry and boosting local economic development.
Continued resurrection efforts
More good news awaits the North Aral in the near future. The Kazakh government has already announced that it will start implementing the second stage of the project to resurrect the North Aral and will continue cooperating with the World Bank and researchers.
Between 2026 and 2029, the authorities plan to make the Kokaral Dam wider and taller to help raise the water level from 40.4 to 44 mBS (meters of the Baltic system). This will also increase the water volume from 27 to 34 billion cubic meters and expand the water surface to 3,913 square kilometers.
In addition to reconstructing the dam, Kazakhstan will modernize and automate irrigation systems in the Turkestan and Kyzylorda provinces, through which water from the Syr Darya flows. This will further improve water resource efficiency and direct the saved water to the North Aral.
Here is a YouTube video about the next steps to resurrect the North Aral.
Ultimately, the goal is to improve the socio-economic standing of the population and the environmental situation of the nearby region.
Kazakhstan’s biggest challenge going forward is the sustainability of the North Aral. The interim success is built on man-made support, which makes the current landscape quasi-natural, characterized as “imperfect, unnatural, and weak” from the sustainability viewpoint.
Reports of significantly reduced fish catch amounts in 2025, from 7.8 to 3.9 thousand tons, and the receding water line underscore the precariousness of this victory.
Kazakhstan’s status as a “downstream country” also contributes to the sustainability problem, making it dependent on the upstream and neighboring Kyrgyzstan for a steady water supply. Not to mention the rapid melting of glaciers that feed the Syr Darya.
Despite these challenges, Kazakhstan has not given up on the North Aral. It has achieved what seemed near impossible twenty years ago and resurrected the dying sea. The North Aral is the only remaining heir to the once mighty and plentiful Aral Sea, deserving of every effort to save it — even without long-term assurances.
