This has been the situation in this borderland since March, when Uzbek troops cut off the road to the town of Ala-Buka, near the reservoir. This move was sparked after Kyrgyz authorities denied an Uzbek request to repair the reservoir in Kyrgyz territory using Uzbek engineers. The security situation escalated from there and culminated in August with the seizure of a Kyrgyz communications relay tower on a disputed mountaintop by helicopter-borne Uzbek police, who detained a number of Kyrgyz technicians. [...]
But this is all in flux. Climate change will continue to increase the area’s “environmental insecurity,” with the densely populated Fergana Valley being the most vulnerable, reads a 2014 report by the World Bank, which is funding economic research into how climate change will alter how people live around the world. Some 22 million people in the valley depend on irrigation for their livelihoods, and shortfalls in water—due to increased evaporation caused by higher temperatures and because glaciers are disappearing—are predicted to become a bigger problem. [...]
“We keep telling these guys about climate change,” Kadyrov, the USAID agricultural specialist, said. “There are some good farmers who understand they need to worry about it, but they do nothing.” Because their plots are small, most farmers in the Fergana do not have the money to invest in new equipment or infrastructure, and they are not trained in water conservation. [...]
Besides ethnicity, evaporation, misuse, population, and poverty, the issue of water is further complicated by the borders in the region. Before the Soviet Union’s breakup, water ran through a united country. Now the water courses through independent countries, crossing disputed borders. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan control most of the sources, while Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan have to either accept what their upstream neighbors give them, pay, negotiate, or try to take it.
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