DUSHANBE, July 23, 2013, Asia-Plus — Tajikistan has begun to actively discharge water from the reservoir powering the Qairoqqum hydroelectric power plant (HPP) in Sughd province for irrigation in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
In a report released at a news conference in Dushanbe, the First Deputy Minister of Land Reclamation and Water Resources, Sulton Rahimov, revealed on July 23 that filling of Kyrgyzstan’s Toktogul reservoir, which is the largest of the reservoirs on the path of the Naryn River, a northern tributary of the Syr Darya, has led to decrease in water inflow in Syr Darya.
He further added that Tajikistan was actively cooperating with downstream countries on use of transboundary rivers.
“If we do not help them today, we cannot to hope for their support for further construction of hydroelectric power stations and reservoirs,” Rahimov noted.
The Syr Darya rises in two headstreams in the Tian Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan and eastern Uzbekistan—the Naryn River and the Kara Darya—and flows for some 2,212 kilometers west and north-west Uzbekistan and southern Kazakhstan to the remains of the Aral Sea. The Syr Darya drains an area of over 800,000 square kilometers, but no more than 200,000 square kilometers actually contribute significant flow to the river. Its annual flow is a very modest — 37 cubic kilometers per year—half that of its sister river, the Amu Darya.
Along its course, the Syr Darya irrigates the most fertile cotton-growing region in the whole of Central Asia, together with the towns of Kokand, Khujand, Kyzylorda and Turkestan. Massive expansion of irrigation canals during the Soviet period, to irrigate cotton fields, caused ecological damage to the area, with the river drying up long before reaching the Aral Sea which, as a result, has shrunk to a small remnant of its former size. With millions of people now settled in these cotton areas, it is not clear how the situation can be rectified.
The Amu Darya is a major river in Central Asia. It is formed by the junction of the Vakhsh and Panj rivers.
About 1,385,045 square kilometers of land is drained by the Amu Darya into the Aral Sea endorheic basin. This includes most of Tajikistan, the southwest corner of Kyrgyzstan, the northeast corner of Afghanistan, a long narrow portion of eastern Turkmenistan and about half of Uzbekistan. About 61% of the drainage lies within Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, while 39% is in Afghanistan. Of the area drained by the Amu Darya, only about 200,000 square kilometers actively contribute water to the river. This is because many of the river”s major tributaries (especially the Zarafshon River) have been diverted, and much of the river”s drainage is dominated by outlying desert and steppe. The abundant water flowing in the Amu Darya comes almost entirely from glaciers in the Pamir Mountains and Tian Shan, which, standing above the surrounding arid plain, collect atmospheric moisture which otherwise would probably escape somewhere else. Without its mountain water sources, the Amu Darya would not contain any water—would not exist—because it rarely rains in the lowlands through which most of the river flows.
