In the Aralkum Desert, afforestation campaigns have multiplied since the early 2000s. They are meant to slow the sandstorms, temper a rapidly warming climate, and protect the health of those still living in the shadow of the Aral Sea. But the promised results have not appeared yet.

The road from Aralsk to Aiteke Bi cuts through a palette of ochre and dust. Trucks drift forward in pale clouds, dragging the desert behind them like a long train. In these villages scattered along the former shoreline of the Aral Sea, the wind never leaves. It is abrasive, restless, and a witness to a vanished water body that once cooled the hottest corner of Kazakhstan. Respiratory diseases now run through family histories, and doctors say they can recognize lungs shaped by ecological collapse.

At the polyclinic in Aiteke Bi, patients describe the same symptoms with weary precision: breath shortening too quickly, coughs that never fully recede, a fatigue that never seems to lift. Nuralay, 52, says the storms “get into the house, into the throat, into everything.” She admits she cannot remember a season without irritation in her chest. For Dr. Kuanyshqar Assilov, who has watched the pattern deepen for years, the cause is unmistakable: decades of airborne salts, pesticide residues, and industrial chemicals lifted from the dried seabed of the Aral Sea.

In Aralsk, sand covers everything

Marat Narbaev, executive director of the International Fund to Save the Aral Sea (IFAS), recounts the disaster’s origins with a mixture of resignation and habit. He traces it back to the 1960s, when Soviet planners diverted the Amu Darya and Syr Darya to feed cotton monocultures. “The cotton was used to make clothing for soldiers and ammunition,” he says. Today, he argues, the basin faces two pressures: “climate change and demographic growth. Fifty million inhabitants… soon seventy.”

In this landscape, the promise of restoring the region through afforestation has acquired symbolic weight. Saxaul trees – hardy, grey-green, capable of surviving in brackish soils – are planted by the millions on the exposed seabed. Officially, they are meant to stabilize sand, calm storms, and cool the surface. Unofficially, they carry the hope that life here might once be breathable again.

Survivalist tree?

On paper, the saxaul is a biological survivalist: roots plunging more than 30 feet deep, the ability to stabilize dunes, lower surface salinity, and grow dense enough within a few years to slow the wind. In Aralkum, a village east of Aralsk, residents praise the planting that lines a dozen houses. “It really worked, the storms became more bearable,” a man says. Then he shrugs: more trees should have been planted. “We asked for the other side of the village, but there’s no funding left.” Nowadays, half of the trees have died, and the rest lie buried beneath the dunes.

In Aralkum village, half of the surviving trees barely emerge from the sand

Sometimes, past plantations have almost zero trees left. According to a 2021 study, Aralkum is one of the few sites where more than half the trees survived. In Karateren, a former fishing village, it is almost impossible to imagine that sixty hectares were planted ten years ago: livestock trampled the seedlings, and saline soils choked the rest.

Across twenty-four plots studied by researchers, only four have survival rates above 40%. The causes repeat themselves: unsuitable soils, lack of irrigation during the first years, extreme aridity, and, in several cases, mismanagement.

The USAID “oasis” turned into a saxaul cemetery

Near the Barsakelmes reserve, a 500-hectare oasis once funded by USAID has been abandoned since U.S. cuts in 2021. The dead saxauls stand like weathered gravestones in the sand.

Mismanagement goes on…

From her small office in Aralsk, Aynur Rysbava, director of the NGO Aral Tenizi, tries to correct these failures. “The programs are far from optimal,” she says. She explains best practices that have been ignored for years: hand-planting, early-season watering, fertilizers, and avoiding monocultures. In one neighborhood nursery, she grows apple, cherry, and pear trees directly from the sand. Her recommendations, she laments, are routinely dismissed.

Aynur Rysbaeva, from the association Aral Tenizi, participating in the IFAS plantation on November 5

Thus, new projects keep repeating the same mistakes: seeds dropped by drones onto empty desert, plantations set up dozens of kilometers from the nearest house, and no one left to tend to them once the trucks pull away. Reaching the latest IFAS site means driving fifty kilometers south of the last village – and getting lost twice on the way. IFAS says 18,000 saxauls were planted that day, a few by students, activists, and bureaucrats performing for the journalists’ cameras. The project invites skepticism. Survival rates, already thin, collapse when no one remains after the lenses turn elsewhere.

… and health worsens

Meanwhile, the storms do not wait for the trees to grow. Some days, Lazzat, 49, can barely speak; the air of Aiteke Bi scrapes her lungs. “When I went to a sanatorium in Almaty, the problems disappeared; but they came back as soon as I returned,” she whispers. “More and more people are getting sick”, she adds.

The air is indeed becoming unbreathable. Atmospheric dust concentrations are reported to be about 32 times higher than sanitary norms in parts of the Aral region, according to a study published by IFAS. Cadmium – a toxic metal found in fertilizers and industrial waste – reaches levels significantly above the national average. Lead, mercury, and arsenic remain embedded in the desert’s brittle salt crusts. With the wind that nothing stops, these substances were detected in human blood and tissues, contributing to cancers and neurological delays in children.

In Aiteke Bi, Kuanyshkul Dauletiyarkyzy runs a center for children with autism spectrum disorders. “There are more every year,” she says. Her hypothesis is bleak: “Mothers eat food and drink water contaminated with plastics.” She had no idea that some hard metals and pesticides were encrusted in the desert.

Wind is not the only vector. Water is changing, too. Demographic pressure has expanded cultivated land and increased water use. In the Kyzylorda region, 90% of all available water goes mainly to rice. Because the irrigation canals are the same cracked, leaking conduits built in Soviet times, almost half the water pumped never reaches the fields, President Tokayev said in his State of the Nation speech in September 2022. The rest evaporates or seeps into the ground. As the Syr Darya’s flow diminishes, the quality of irrigation water deteriorates. Salinity has doubled since 2017, according to the same study published by IFAS.

Blind spots 

Yet the full health impacts remain obscure. There is little monitoring, no long-term epidemiological data, and no systematic water testing. “We didn’t really have a good database to check all this information,” admits Toheeb Olalekan Oladejo, an assistant researcher at Nazarbayev University and co-author of a study on environmental health.

Because the environmental crises overlap, it is difficult to isolate any single pollutant from the cocktail that saturates the air and water. Doctors tend to stay vague. When Nuralay sought treatment in Astana, hospital staff suggested that her mysterious allergy might be linked to the poor air quality blowing in from the Aral.

Another blind spot is mental health. The few studies available paint an alarming picture: diminished memory and attention, anxiety, depression, and high somatic distress scores. “A lot of people are suffering from this type of mental health issue, disproportionately compared to other cities,” says Toheeb Olalekan Oladejo. According to Dr. Kuanyshqar Assilov, schools in Kyzylorda are already raising red flags over increasing psychological distress among young people. Whether they are caused by hard metals, climate change, or socio-economic conditions, “we cannot say”, Toheeb Olalekan Oladejo admits.

Saxaul can improve human health indirectly by stabilizing toxic sediments, lowering dust emissions near plantations, and slightly improving air quality. However, in this context, the saxaul plantations also play a symbolic role: a psychological buffer, an illusion of repair. A small forest can’t stop a crisis of this scale, but it can offer a narrative of progress, a form of collective resilience, perhaps even a placebo. When asked whether Kazakhstan will truly manage to plant more than a million trees, Marat Narbaev pauses before replying: “What else can we do?” The answer captures the dilemma: the plantations persist not because they will fix the problem, but because doing nothing feels impossible.