June 15, 2010 | Posted by
Will Rogers - 8:50am |
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Last week, the Water Matters @ Columbia blog at the Earth Institute at Columbia University had an interesting post on a project underway at the Columbia Water Center where researchers are working to identify the complex environmental, political and economic challenges developing in Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan) around water issues. “A small nutshell description of a vastly complex situation: The five states are connected by two major rivers, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, which are fundamental to their survival,” writes Julia Hitz.
According to Hitz, during the Cold War, the upstream (Kyrgzstan and Tajikistan) and downstream (Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan) states had viable, mutually supportive relationships by which the upstream states, during the wetter seasons, produced electricity using hydroelectric energy facilities. During the drier seasons, upstream states released more water flow to their southern neighbors to use for irrigation, reducing their own energy production. In return, downstream states provided coal and natural gas to supplement their neighbor’s energy requirements. “This worked well enough as long as the Soviet State was enforcing the transactions,” Hitz notes.