Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have inaugurated a pair of upgraded flow-monitoring stations on transboundary canals in a measure designed to lay the ground for improved collective water resource management in the region.

Tajikistan’s Energy and Water Resources Ministry said in a statement on February 23 that the monitoring posts will provide automated and real-time digital data on the volumes of water passing through them.

The project to build the facilities was completed with funding from the Swiss Cooperation Office.

The opening ceremony, which was attended by Tajik Energy and Water Resources Minister Daler Juma and Uzbek Water Resources Minister Shavkat Khamrayev, took place against the backdrop of a bilateral working group on the integrated use of water resources held in the northern Tajik city of Guliston.

Successful dialogue in this kind of format is increasingly seen as indispensable to ensure that Central Asia is spared the gravest consequences of a looming water shortage crisis.

Concern over the problem has latterly graduated into alarm.

In April 2023, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s office warned that it was expecting the volume of water in the region’s two main rivers to shrink by 20 percent in the following irrigation season as compared to a recent multi-year average. That forecast was included in an emergency presidential decree to envisioned a 10-15 percent reduction of the volume of the Syr Darya and 15-20 percent contraction of the Amu Darya. Both rivers once flowed into the Aral Sea, 90 percent of which has vanished since 1960.

Harbingers of catastrophe are coming from all sides. In a report published in November, the Almaty-based Eurasian Development Bank predicted that Central Asia was “highly likely to face an acute chronic water deficit of 5–12 [cubic kilometers] in 2028–2029.”

“The region will potentially experience agriculture, industry, and energy crises. Shortages of food, drinking water, and electricity will cause a mass exodus of people from rural areas to cities and abroad,” the report stated.

The situation is being compounded by Afghanistan’s work on a 285-kilometer canal, the Qosh-Tepa, intended for the irrigation of up to 550,000 hectares of farming land. Once finished, the Qosh-Tepa will have the capacity to divert up to 20 percent of water from the Amu Darya.