Can The Aral Sea Be Saved?
By Charles Carlson The shrinking of the Aral Sea — once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water — has devastated much of southwestern Kazakhstan and northwestern Uzbekistan, and wreaked havoc on the lives of tens of thousands of people. But despite the creation of numerous international programs and the holding of dozens of conferences, no single coordinated program of measures has yet been agreed on to improve the situation. Prague, 16 June 2003 (RFE/RL) — On 9-12 June, the board of the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFAS), an organization that unites the five Central Asian states, met to draw up a program of concrete measures to improve the ecological and socio-economic situation in the Aral Sea basin. The Dushanbe meeting was one of many held in recent years. Participants invariably agree the situation is alarming and that urgent action is needed to save the sea and improve the living conditions of the tens of thousands of people affected by the changing clim
