The Toktogul hydroelectric and irrigation scheme is the largest in Central Asia, with a reservoir containing almost 20 km3 of impounded water behind a 230 m-high dam. Annually, the scheme generates 1200 MW of electricity that is distributed over Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Russia. The scheme is vital for the economic, social and agricultural stability and development of the emerging central Asian republics it serves and, since it is no longer administered centrally as it was in Soviet times, is increasingly the focus of cross-border tensions involving competing needs for irrigation water and power supplies, AKI-press reprorted.

The project employs a state-of-the-art multidisciplinary approach involving close collaboration between NATO and former eastern block geoscientists to analyze potential threats to the security of the Toktogul region; with recommendations for measures to mitigate a range of threat scenarios. Most notably these scenarios involve the potential for very large magnitude earthquakes, with associated widespread slope instability, occurring on the Talas-Fergana fault. This structure, some 700 km long, bisects the Toktogul scheme. However, its significance was unrecognized during the construction phase of the scheme in Soviet times, when plate-tectonics, and the large translational movements of the Earth’s crust that it requires, was dismissed by mainstream Soviet geologists. Moreover, as a further Soviet legacy, there are some 23 repositories of uranium mining waste in the region, many of which are vulnerable to seismically induced landsliding, release of reservoir water and breaching of landslide-dammed lakes.

Understanding the nature, location and recurrence patterns of threats to the environmental security of this region, as well as ways of mitigating against these threats, is crucial to planning and ensuring continued economic development and political stability, including avoiding conflicts over water and power supplies, extensive pollution of irrigated lands, and opportunities for terrorist groups to make propaganda from disorder.

Dr Derek Rust is Senior Lecturer at the School of Earth & Environmental Sciences of the University of Portsmouth.