Ural River runs across Russia and Kazakhstan. It is 1,509 miles (2,428 km) long and drains an area of 91,500 square miles (237,000 square km). It rises in the Ural Mountains near Mount Kruglaya and flows south along their eastern flank past Magnitogorsk. Its flow has a great spring maximum, and freeze-up lasts from late November to April.
It flows into the Caspian Sea, has been a life giver for centuries. It provided the water to the medieval Silk Road city of Saray Maly and now is the primary water source for the 4.2 million people that live on its shores. However, the third longest river in Europe has been gradually depleting for decades due to a combination of harmful water management policies, local dependence on the river, industrial pollution and climate change.
The significance of the Ural Basin to the Eurasian region’s vitality has been recognized for a long time. During the Soviet period, numerous measures were taken to protect the Ural river. Part of the Ural river from Barbastau to the Nord Caspian Sea had protected status; and in 1972 the USSR reduced water withdrawal for industrial needs in an attempt to reduce pollution. In more recent years, an agreement was signed on the preservation of the transborder ecosystem between Russia and Kazakhstan in October 2016, providing for joint actions to improve the river’s ecosystem. This was followed by a Russian-Kazakh commission meeting for the first time in November 2018 to discuss the river, recognizing the national and sub-regional importance of the basin.
Despite all these measures, River Ural is shrinking and facing pollution problems. In a report published in 2017 on the Ural Basin, a Kazakh-Russian group of scientists attested to up to 20 billion tons of industrial waste in the Ural Basin. The oil industry along with hydroelectric complexes built to provide energy for Russia’s industrial sector in the Orenburg and Chelyabinsk regions, has had significant effects on the Ural. This pollution is leading to the depletion of a species of fish known as sturgeon. This is attributed to the inadequate freshwater management.
The Ural basin currently has 13 large scale water reservoirs, each of which has a capacity of at least 10 million cubic metres. The construction of such reservoirs began during the Soviet period with the parallel construction of hydroelectric power stations, but today, many of the reservoirs built in the higher and middle parts of the basin are used inefficiently. Furthermore, the plethora of dams and hydroelectric stations has all but stopped river flow, causing the channel bed to overgrow with reeds and algae.
Bottom line
The combination of these factors poses serious and incredibly immediate risks to the region’s inhabitants and beyond. In early autumn 2019, citizens of Uralsk in West Kazakhstan were left without drinking water, the water having become so shallow that water pumps no longer worked, necessitating dredging as a temporary solution to the problem.
by: Abeer Arshad
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