News & Events

The Aral Sea: Let’s turn the tide with innovation!

Do you know how many people have been affected by the Aral Sea ecological disaster? More than four million people live in the disaster zone, which covers a significant part of Uzbekistan and the southern part of Kazakhstan, and 40 million people live in the Aral Sea basin.

Due to human activities, the structure of lake water has changed. Salt concentration has increased tenfold (1) and local groundwater has a salt concentration reaching 6 g/L. This is six times higher than the concentration considered safe by the WHO.⠀

Moreover, salt from the Aral Sea is found far beyond this region – in Scandinavia and Antarctica. Every year wind carries some 150 million tons of toxic salt from the Aral Sea for hundreds of thousands of kilometres.

The Aral Sea and millions of people need solutions. At the beginning of November 2020, Kazakh-German University will announce the official call for proposals for the Disruptive Tech Challenge for landscape restoration in the Aral Sea watershed (in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan).

The tech challenge is looking for innovators around the world to help mitigate the impacts of this catastrophe. This project is implemented with the support of the Central Asia Water and Energy Program (CAWEP), administered by the World Bank and financed by the European Union, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, and is part of the World Bank Resilient Landscape in Central Asia RESILAND CA + Program. The project is implemented by the Kazakh-German University (DKU) in partnership with the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF).

For more information, please, contact Balzhan Zhumagazina, zhumagazina@dku.kz.


Back to page 

Subscribe to news and events