The Aral Sea to be Restored

The story of the Aral dates back to the 1970s, when the Soviet government diverted two main rivers feeding the Aral to irrigate cotton fields in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

Map of Kazakhstan showing Aral Sea
Starved of water, the sea began to shrink.

The desert spread, changing the climate, destroying the economy and the ecosystem, eradicating species and forcing thousands of people to leave the area.

By the 1990s only a quarter of the Aral Sea was left, but recently using a $68m loan from the World Bank, the Kazakh government built a dam that split the sea into two parts. BBC