Because of diversion of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya for cotton cultivation and other purposes, what once was the world's fourth largest inland sea has shrunk in the past thirty years to only about one-third of its 1960 volume and less than half its 1960 geographical size.
Indeed, much of Uzbekistan's capital city, Tashkent, was destroyed in a major earthquake in 1966, and other earthquakes have caused significant damage before and since the Tashkent disaster.
In 1989 the Minister of Health of the Turkmen SSR described the Amu Darya as a sewage ditch for industrial and agricultural waste substances.
Post-Soviet policies have become even more dangerous; in the early 1990s, the average application of chemical fertilizers and insecticides throughout the Central Asian republics was twenty to twenty-five kilograms per hectare, compared with the former average of three kilograms per hectare for the entire Soviet Union.
Experts who monitored the river in 1995 reported even further deterioration. In the early 1990s, about 60% of pollution control funding went to water-related projects, but only about half of cities and about one-quarter of villages have sewers.
By the mid-1990s, such issues had become a key concern of all opposition groups and a cause of growing concern among the population as a whole. In the first half of the 1990s, many plans were proposed to limit or discourage economic practices that damage the environment.
international donors has been working to help improve the health conditions in Uzbekistan since the 1990s.
The World Bank worked with the countries in the Aral Sea Basin to form the Aral Sea Basin Assistance Program (ASBP) in the early 1990s.
Experts who monitored the river in 1995 reported even further deterioration. In the early 1990s, about 60% of pollution control funding went to water-related projects, but only about half of cities and about one-quarter of villages have sewers.
The government estimated in 1995 that only 230 of the country's 8,000 industrial enterprises were following pollution control standards. ===Air pollution=== Poor water management and heavy use of agricultural chemicals also have polluted the air.
The ICAS was formed to work with the World Bank in order to improve the conditions of the Aral Sea, but was disbanded in 1997 to form IFAS. The Uzbekistan government along with NGOs and U.S.
The World Bank also formed the Water and Environmental Management Project in 1998 that was funded by both the World Bank and the Global Environmental Facility (GEF).
All text is taken from Wikipedia. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License .
Page generated on 2021-08-05