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tactic on the hydropower projects in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Back in July 2016,
when Mirziyoyev was still prime minister under Karimov, he penned a vitriolic
open letter to his Tajik counterpart, warning that Rogun was “fraught with enor-
mous threats for the whole of Central Asia.”
Only a few months later, after Karimov’s death, when Tajikistan started a new and
important stage of the project, Tashkent broke a long-standing habit by declining
to make any public comment on the matter. In another incremental shift of tone
in June this year, the deputy speaker of Uzbekistan’s lower house of parliament,
Boriy Alihanov, told reporters that Tashkent favoured what he termed the fair use
of transboundary water resources as outlined by international law.
If there is still only guarded openness from Uzbekistan to a change of language
on Rogun, the situation with Kyrgyzstan is more suggestive of conviviality. So much
so that the strategic partnership agreement signed by the Kyrgyz and Uzbek lead-
ers at the start of October even envisions co-opera-
tion in “energy issues, including in the implementa-
tion of joint projects in the hydropower industry.”
Considered in broad terms, the calculus seeming-
ly conceived by Mirziyoyev is to give tacit support to
economy-boosting infrastructure among neighbours
in the expectation that these same countries will be-
come customers for the products of Uzbekistan’s in-
dustrial sector. This would replace the never-reliable
security nexus for one based on trade. Those with the
interests of the region at heart must hope this has not
come too late. As a growing body of research shows,
only an optimal co-operation scenario is going to be sufficient to avert the exis-
tential water-related dangers down the road.
A combination of rapid population growth and climate change, which some
believe may lead to the vanishing of much of the region’s river-feeding glaciers
within the next half century, is going to pose the greatest challenge Central Asia
has ever confronted in its history. But as a 2016 World Bank study on the economic
impact of climate change on various regions of the globe has illustrated, it is not
all doom and gloom. “When governments respond to water shortages by boost-
ing efficiency and allocating water to more highly-valued uses, losses decline dra-
matically and may even vanish,” concludes the study, titled High and Dry: Climate
Change, Water, and the Economy.
For upstream countries, highly-valued uses have come to mean exploiting
hydropower. In Uzbekistan, Mirziyoyev plans to implement another meaningful
gear-shift by reducing the area of land where thirsty cotton crops are grown inOnly an optimal
co-operation
scenario is going
to be sufficient
to avert the
existential water-
related dangers
down the road.Opinion & Analysis Central Asia and water, Peter Leonard