Hoy quiero compartirles un articulo de una compañera de mi curso llamada Margaret Reinhardt. Está en ingles como ella lo escribió originalmente, es una lección de algo que no debiera volver a ocurrir.
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Problem:
The Aral Sea is located in parts of
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia, and since the 1950's it
has decreased in size to only 1/10 of it's original volume. It was
once the 4th largest lake in the world at over 26,000
square miles. It's shrinkage is considered one of the planet's worst
environmental disasters.
Who it affects: Over time, the
diminishing of the Aral Sea resulted in unemployment and economic
hardships in the surrounding fishing industry which employed 40,000
workers. It's current lakebed is highly polluted with toxic chemicals
which become airborne resulting in numerous health problems including
tuberculosis, high infant mortality rate, and certain cancers. The
surrounding populations have limited access to fresh water. What
remains of this sea is now as salty as the ocean, and the increased
salinity has killed off the natural flora and fauna of the area. The
local climate has become drier and hotter in the Summer, and the
Winters colder and longer.
Cause: Beginning in the 1950's, water
was diverted from 2 major rivers which feed the Aral Sea. At the
time, soviet leader Khrushchev wanted to increase the amount of land
under production in order to alleviate hunger in the Soviet Union. He
instituted the Virgin Lands Campaign to grow wheat and cotton on
previously uncultivated lands. 300,000 youth were enlisted to clear
the steppes, build irrigation canals, plant and harvest the crops.
The campaign was initially successful in 1954, but had mixed results
during the following 10 years. Irrigation canals were poorly built
and farming practices were poor and badly managed. The degradation to
the Aral Sea was already recognized by soviet scientists in the
1960's, but it was trivialized or considered too expensive to resolve
at that time.
Solution:
The restoration of the Aral Sea began
receiving attention again only after the demise of the soviet system
in 1991. The 5 newly-independent countries in the region agreed to
set aside 1% of their budgets to help the sea recover. UNESCO and the
World Bank initiated programs which failed to include local input and
were discontinued.
A number of processes have been
identified in a continuum of solutions:
- improve the quality of the
irrigation canals (reduce amount of water lost to land and
evaporation)
- install desalinization plants
(provide fresh water to area)
- assess fee to farmers for water
use
- plant species that are less
water-intensive
- use fewer chemicals on crops
- increase crop diversity
- build dams to fill the Aral Sea
- redirect water from other rivers
- pump sea water into the Aral Sea
from the Caspian.
The Aral Sea Basin Program (ASBP) was
initiated in 1992 by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute
based in Islamabad. Although it established 4 key objectives, it
encountered problems due to the various stakeholders having different
priorities. By 1997, it settled on a plan to upgrade the current
irrigation systems and focus on local water management. The largest
project involved the construction of a dam which resulted in
significant improvement in the northern portion of the Aral Sea.
Unfortunately, the southern – and
largest – portion of the Aral Sea is dominated by the govt of Uzbekistan
which
controls cotton production, called “white gold.” It is dependent
on irrigation and refuses to change. The production of cotton is an
example of another problem, monoculture. Not only is it water-intensive,
but requires excess chemicals and uses child labor.
