Where one of the world’s largest lakes once stretched across Central Asia, a new forest is taking root. Over the past five years, Uzbekistan has established 1.7 million hectares (about 4.2 million acres) of desert-tolerant vegetation on the exposed bed of the Aral Sea — one of the most ambitious ecological restoration efforts ever attempted.
At a glance
- Aral Sea afforestation: Uzbekistan has planted trees and shrubs across 1.7 million hectares of the dried lakebed since 2019, with plans to plant an additional 150,000 to 200,000 hectares in 2024 C.E.
- Saxaul trees: A single mature saxaul shrub can stop two to four metric tons of moving sand, while each hectare of saxaul absorbs 1.1 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, according to a 2023 C.E. study.
- Community employment: More than 300 residents of the Karakalpak region and around 150 Forestry Agency staff are planting seedlings together, with local women leading seed collection and men joining as seasonal plantation workers.
How a sea became a desert
The Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest lake in the world. Soviet-era irrigation projects diverted the rivers feeding it toward cotton monocultures, and by the 1960s the lake began to shrink. Decade by decade it retreated, leaving behind a vast salt flat now called the Aralkum Desert.
The exposed lakebed is coated in crystallized pesticide runoff and salt. When the wind blows — which it does often — that toxic sediment lifts into the air and blankets surrounding communities. The health toll is severe. Local populations face high rates of respiratory disease, anemia, cancer, and digestive illness. A report from Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Ecology found that the probability of an Uzbek citizen dying prematurely from cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, or cancer is higher than one in four.
Efforts to refill even a fraction of the lake failed against the structural reality of those Soviet-era dams. Officials eventually shifted strategy: instead of restoring the water, they would cover the lakebed with life.
Planting at scale
The Uzbekistan Forestry Agency is using every tool available. Seeds are dispersed by plane across the broader lakebed. Around 360 tractors dig channels roughly one meter deep every ten meters to plant saplings manually. Workers grow saxaul seedlings in forestry nurseries for one to two years before transferring them to the Aral Sea bed, where they establish over another year or two.
The primary species — Haloxylon ammodendron, known as saxaul — is built for this landscape. It tolerates salt, resists drought, and anchors sand. The Forestry Agency has prepared more than 190 metric tons of seeds, including saltwort (Salsola spp.), ephedra (Ephedra strobilacea), and tamarisk (Tamarix spp.).
Survival rates vary. “Based on the amount of rain received in a year, the survival of saplings is determined,” said Turaxon Ziyotov, a scientist at the Forest Research Institute in Tashkent. “With more rainfall the survival rate varies from 50 to 70%, but with low precipitation it reduces to 30%.”
The Karakalpak people are leading the work
Karakalpakstan — the Uzbek autonomous region home to the Karakalpak people — sits at the epicenter of the sandstorm crisis. It is also where community involvement in the project runs deepest.
Women in the Muynak area lead saxaul seed collection each September and October. Men join the planting crews from November through early March. Gulzira, one resident now working on the project, described her initial disbelief.
“I could not believe it when plans were going to transform the dried Aralkum Desert into a forest,” she said. “But when tractors passed by our doorways, I was surprised to see the project taking place.”
The work has changed more than the landscape. “Most men used to stay at home before or go to Russia during the winter season for work, but now most of them are engaged with the initiative as seasonal workers,” Gulzira said. Incomes have improved, she added, even as the winter planting is physically hard.
Kazakhstan, which borders the northern half of the former sea, is pursuing a parallel effort. The country plans to plant saxaul on 275,000 hectares of dried lakebed, eventually scaling to 1.1 million hectares by 2025 C.E., according to the Kazakh ecology ministry.
What the forest does — and what it can’t guarantee
Inside the plantation zones, vegetation slows wind speed and keeps salt and dust particles from rising into the air. A 2023 C.E. study published in E3S Web of Conferences found that saxaul formation strengthens mobile sands and slows desertification. Each hectare releases 0.8 metric tons of oxygen per year.
The long-term picture is more complicated. Precipitation in Karakalpakstan is falling. Dildora Aralova, a forestry specialist and co-author of a 2018 C.E. report on drought in Central Asia, noted that the region received just 10 mm of rain over five years starting in 2020 C.E. — an extremely low figure even by desert standards.
“The resilience of a landscape to climate change in water-scarce areas is one of the core environmental problems nowadays for Central Asian countries,” Aralova said. Introducing a new forest ecosystem onto a dried lakebed could also disrupt existing species and migration patterns, she noted, and communities may see mixed economic outcomes as new industries alter traditional land use.
Proper community consultation will be critical to making those trade-offs work — and the project’s survival depends in part on rainfall patterns no one can fully predict.
Still, Daniel Tsegai, a program officer at the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, sees the Aral Sea project as a model for what nature-based recovery can look like. “The alternatives that derive from nature are somewhat more easily accessible and close to local people,” he said. “It’s about making innovative use of the resources or reusing and rehabilitating one’s land.”
What was once a vanishing sea is becoming, slowly and imperfectly, a living landscape again.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Mongabay
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights and 160 million hectares recognized ahead of COP30
- Ghana expands its marine protected area at Cape Three Points
- The Good News for Humankind archive on reforestation
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