Coping with international water conflict in Central Asia: implications of climate change and melting ice in the Syr Darya catchment

Climate models predict important changes in Central Asia's temperature and precipitation, which could exacerbate already existing tensions over scarce water resources. This paper tries to examine how projected climatic changes could affect water availability in the Syr Darya catchment, one of the two largest international river systems in Central Asia. The paper notes that major new dam projects in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are provoking hostile reactions from Uzbekistan, which depends highly upon water from the two mountainous upstream countries.

The authors find the following:

• the contribution to runoff from additional, climate change induced glacier melt is small at the basin scale
• however, it can be large in some individual sub-catchments of the Syr Darya, having significant water management implications for neighbouring communities
• climate change-induced runoff increases are unlikely to mitigate the conflict over water allocation between the up- and downstream, even in the short to medium term
• there is an urgent need for internationally coordinated infrastructure development in the catchment that helps decrease flood risks and offsets the long-term loss of land ice
• another reason for intensified international cooperation in the basin emanates from the risk that retreating ice could also cause catastrophic glacier lake outburst
• this increased risk in particular requires greater investment for disaster preparedness, and a mix of centralised and distributed man-made storage capacity is needed.