The drying of the Aral Sea is the worst environmental tragedy I have ever seen with my own eyes. Once a vast inland sea, shimmering and alive, it has now withered into patches of salt-crusted desert, where rusting ships lie stranded and winds carry toxic dust across the land.
For me, the Aral’s decline is not just a local crisis but a mirror of our broader failures to protect nature. And as I look at the globe today, I see another unfolding catastrophe of equal or even greater scale: the rise of the seas, the surge in tsunamis and cyclones, and the slow drowning of coastal cities. What connects these tragedies is our failure to understand the balance of water on this planet, and our inability to act before the damage becomes irreversible.
The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth-largest inland lake, covering over 68,000 square kilometers. Situated between northern Uzbekistan and southern Kazakhstan, it supported millions of people with its fisheries, fertile lands, and unique ecosystem. The Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers sustained it for centuries. But during the Soviet era, these rivers were diverted on a massive scale to irrigate cotton fields.
At first, the shrinking of the Aral was gradual. Then, over the decades, it became catastrophic. More than 90% of the Aral Sea has disappeared. Today, the once-mighty expanse has been reduced to just 3,500 square kilometers, scattered into four smaller lakes.
The consequences are heartbreaking. The fishing economy collapsed, agricultural land turned barren, and the rich biodiversity of the region has been pushed to the edge of extinction. The exposed seabed, laced with salt and pesticides, has become a toxic dust bowl, carried by winds across Central Asia, poisoning crops and human lungs alike.
Villages that once lived by the water’s edge are now stranded dozens of kilometers from the shore. I have walked across that dead seabed and seen children playing where fishing boats once floated. It is a ghostly, painful reminder of how quickly human choices can destroy nature’s gifts.
The Aral is often described as one of the world’s greatest environmental tragedies, yet so few people outside the region even know it happened. In the global imagination, it is almost forgotten, and that silence is itself a tragedy. For me, however, it has remained a wound, a constant reminder that ecological damage once done is almost impossible to undo. Restoration projects exist, but they move slowly, too slowly for a sea that once teemed with life.
While I mourn the Aral, I cannot ignore the other side of the planet’s water crisis. Even as one great body of water has disappeared, the oceans are swelling. Sea levels are rising at an accelerating rate, fueling tsunamis and cyclones that now strike more often and with greater intensity. Where the Aral vanished through human mismanagement of rivers, the oceans rise because of another kind of mismanagement: decades of greenhouse gas emissions and our failure to protect glaciers and ice sheets.
Throughout most of the twentieth century, the average global sea level rose at about 1.4 millimeters per year. But from 2006 to 2015, this rate jumped to 3.6 millimeters annually, and it continues to accelerate. I have spent more than three decades advocating for the preservation of glaciers, which are one of the key drivers of sea-level rise as they melt. I tried my best to protect them, to sound the alarm, to urge action. But after all these years, nothing substantial has been achieved. The ice continues to disappear, and the oceans creep higher, swallowing coastlines inch by inch.
The impacts of rising seas are profound. A rise of just one foot may sound modest, but a single foot of sea-level rise can flood neighborhoods, destroy wetlands, and make once-rare storm surges a regular occurrence. Drainage systems fail, rivers back up, and floods spread even far inland. Coastal homes and businesses suffer damage, transportation systems falter, and economic stability is threatened. For some communities, flooding will become permanent; for others, fertile wetlands will simply be lost to open water.
The cities most at risk are among the largest in the world. In the United States, New York and Miami are already struggling with “sunny-day flooding,” where high tides alone can inundate streets. In Asia, megacities like Shanghai, Bangkok, Kolkata, Mumbai, and Dhaka face even greater peril. Their sheer size and population density mean that millions could be displaced, with trillions of dollars in infrastructure and assets at risk. These are not hypothetical dangers—they are happening already.
The rising seas also amplify natural disasters. Just three weeks ago, tsunami waves struck parts of Russia, Japan, and the United States after a massive earthquake off Russia’s coast, with alerts spreading across Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific. Scientists have long warned that higher seas give every tsunami and cyclone greater destructive power. Storm surges push farther inland, waves rise higher, and damage multiplies. Cyclones, fed by warmer waters, are becoming stronger and more frequent, transforming once-rare disasters into routine occurrences.
As I reflect on these global events, I cannot help but see a connection between the Aral’s disappearance and the swelling seas. On the surface, they seem like opposites—one a vanishing body of water, the other an overabundance. Yet in truth, they are both symptoms of the same problem: human disregard for the planet’s natural balance. The Aral vanished because rivers were mismanaged, diverted without thought for consequences. The seas are rising because the atmosphere has been overloaded with emissions, melting glaciers that once held the world’s waters in check. Both crises teach us that delay is deadly and that the costs of inaction are unbearable.
For decades, I have thought about solutions—not just small ones but bold, technical steps that match the scale of the problem. And one solution, discussed as early as Khrushchev’s era and again in the 1980s, still strikes me as both possible and necessary. This is the idea of diverting part of Russia’s great north-flowing rivers, such as the Ob and the Irtysh, southward into Central Asia to replenish the Aral Sea.
At present, these mighty rivers flow into the Arctic Ocean, dispersing with little benefit to human societies. Redirecting part of their waters toward Central Asia could serve multiple purposes at once. It could revive the Aral Sea, breathing life back into ecosystems, economies, and communities. It could stabilize the Central Asian climate, reducing toxic dust storms and desertification.
By providing reliable water sources, it could lessen dependence on melting glaciers, which in turn would help slow sea-level rise globally. And indirectly, by stabilizing glaciers and easing water stress, such a project could reduce the risks faced by coastal cities, which are now on the frontlines of climate change.
Of course, this would not be simple. Diverting rivers on such a scale would require vast investment, unprecedented international cooperation, and careful ecological planning. Critics rightly point out that interfering with natural rivers carries risks of its own. Yet when I weigh those risks against the alternative—the loss of entire coastal megacities, the displacement of hundreds of millions, the irreversible drowning of human history—the choice becomes clearer. We cannot afford to do nothing.
Standing on the dry floor of the Aral, I realized I was looking not just at a tragedy of the past, but at a warning for the future. The Aral was once written off as unsalvageable, and today we hear similar whispers about cities like Miami or Dhaka—that saving them may be impossible. But such fatalism is dangerous. It paralyzes us at the very moment when action is most needed. If we learned anything from the Aral Sea, it is that the costs of waiting are catastrophic.
I have lived long enough to see both a sea vanish and oceans rise. These are not abstract lessons but lived experiences, etched into the land and into human lives. They tell us that our relationship with water—whether rivers, lakes, glaciers, or seas—defines the fate of our civilizations. If we continue on this path, the future will be one of drowned coasts and vanished lakes. But if we act boldly, with vision and determination, we can still alter that course. Diverting rivers, investing in resilience, preserving glaciers, cutting emissions—these are not just technical challenges, but moral imperatives.
Now is the moment for decisive global leadership. The world cannot afford to treat rising seas, devastating tsunamis, cyclones, and torrential rainfalls as isolated disasters. They are symptoms of a deeper crisis, one that demands bold and immediate action. If Donald Trump truly wishes to protect the United States from the billions in annual losses caused by cyclones and the kind of torrential rainfall that devastated Los Angeles this year, then he must recognize that the fight against sea-level rise begins not just on American shores, but in Central Asia. The most practical and impactful solution lies in reviving the Aral Sea by implementing the plan that Soviet scientists and planners first proposed in the 1980s: diverting water from Russia’s north-flowing rivers, such as the Ob and the Irtysh, into the Aral Sea first.
This is not merely a regional project; it is a global lifeline. By refilling the Aral Sea, we preserve glaciers, stabilize the climate, and slow the relentless rise of the oceans that threaten to submerge our cities. I hope that in the next high-level talks, President Trump, President Putin, and the United Nations Secretary-General will sit together, not as rivals but as stewards of humanity’s future, and commit to this urgent task. The time has come to act with courage and vision. The world must refill the Aral Sea first if we are to protect our coasts, our cities, and our future generations from the menace of rising seas, tsunamis, cyclones, sea storms, and torrential rainfall.
Sergey Kwan
