TASARAL, Kazakhstan -- In the tiny fishing village of Tasaral on the western shore of Kazakhstan's Lake Balkhash, the spawning season is a time for getting other things done.
Fishing is banned during this 45-day period that extends until mid-June, so the community of some 500 people that depends on the lake for its existence does odd jobs, such as mending fishing boats, building barns, and refurbishing homes.
It is also a time to ponder the future of the huge 17,000 square-kilometer body of water -- the third-largest in Asia -- that gives the village its reason to exist, but which has unfortunately been receding notably the last four years.
Residents who grew up with their elders' accounts of the lake’s cyclical rise and fall hope this situation is only temporary.
But the lake faces growing ecological pressure in the form of climate change and China’s rising demand for water upstream.
Then there is the matter of government plans for a nuclear power plant that, if greenlighted in a nationwide referendum, would likely be built on the lake’s southern shore, about three hours from Tasaral.
“If you can’t catch fish, there is no living for you here,” fisherman Bauyrzhan Altaev told RFE/RL’s Kazakh Service, proudly showing off a Japanese motorbike that he uses to ice fish when Balkhash freezes over in the winter.
But these days, you have to travel farther and farther from the shoreline to get to the fish, he complained.
“Those rocks over there used to be fully under water, but now they are on the surface. I’m 60. [The lake] got like this in 1980. Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, it started to fill up again somewhat. But since 2020 it has been receding very quickly,” said Altaev, gesturing across a scrubby shoreline roamed by two humped camels -- a second form of income for Tasaral residents.
'No One Seems To Know Or Do Anything'
Lake Balkhash has been fished since time immemorial.
But settlements like Tasaral only became a feature of the lake’s shoreline in the 1930s, when Soviet authorities began creating fishing villages for industrial-scale fishing.
Fish that were indigenous to what is one of the world’s 20 largest inland bodies of water soon disappeared. Pike were among the first highly predatory fish introduced and then blamed for taking out species further down the food chain.
Eldos Kasenuly, another fisherman from Tasaral, said there are fewer of all types of fish now, with the reeds that they feed on also becoming scarcer.
A more recent problem is visiting fishermen who use Chinese-made, nylon nets that catch everything.
The nets scoop up even tiny fish that form an important part of the lake’s fragile ecosystem, he explained.
Yet the biggest worry for Kazakhstan is the disappearing water in the lake.
Balkhash currently stands at around 341 meters above sea level -- viewed as a critical indicator by experts -- and has a relatively shallow average depth of around 6 meters.
The tragic history of the Aral Sea -- a decimated lake split between southwestern Kazakhstan and neighboring Uzbekistan -- is a sufficient warning in terms of the consequences of allowing giant bodies of water in largely arid Central Asia to dry up.
To this day, great swathes of the territory surrounding what remains of the Aral Sea continue to be afflicted by toxic dust storms and overly salinated soil that negatively impact agriculture -- not to mention causing pressing shortages of water.
What can Kazakhstan do to prevent that scenario from repeating?
That was the question being asked at the end of May in Balkhash, a city some 100 kilometers from Tasaral, which hosted an international water forum featuring state officials, civil society figures, entrepreneurs, and academics.
But the mood at the forum was pessimistic.
Lake Balkhash receives around 80 percent of its water from the Ili River that originates in neighboring China.
For about the last two decades there has been a giant expansion of industry and agriculture in China’s western Xinjiang region, requiring ever greater water diversion upstream.
'Now Their Fishermen Come Here'
And while some experts at the conference expressed the point of view that China was still providing the necessary 12-14 billion cubic meters of water that Balkhahsh needs, it is unclear how sustainable this is in the long run, while there is still no bilateral agreement on water-sharing for the Ili River.
“In China, the Water Resources Ministry is a government within a government. It includes 30 research institutes, each one studying and monitoring its own area,” said Anar Tleulesova, an expert whose organization works with the government researching and monitoring the basin areas of lakes Balkhash and Alakol. “We have only one institute, where no one seems to know or do anything.”
Kazakh officials refute claims by Tleulesova and other experts that the government has failed to represent national interests in talks with their powerful partner.
Bolat Bekniyaz, deputy water resources minister, argued that Beijing had not reached water-sharing agreements with any country, while Kazakhstan was the only country that China was in talks with over such a deal, he said, claiming that "the level [of Balkhahsh] has not dropped below dangerous levels in the last 20 years.”
There was little talk at the water forum about the government’s plans to build a nuclear power plant on the shore of the town of Ulken. But it is a much-discussed topic in the communities around Balkhash, and not everybody is opposed to the idea.
Lively public hearings held in Ulken last year revealed that many residents saw the plant as part of a path to economic revival for a region that remains distinctly postindustrial and poor in many areas.
But fishermen from the town were firmly in the naysayers' camp, as is Kasenuly, the Tasaral fisherman.
He cited another fishing village called Mynaral, situated between Tasaral and Ulken, as an argument.
“They built a cement plant there and it polluted everything. Now their fishermen sometimes come here because there are no fish over there,” Kasenuly said.
“If a [nuclear] catastrophe occurs, everything will perish," the fisherman added. "How will we live if [Lake] Balkhash disappears?”
Kazakh President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev has pledged to hold a national referendum to decide whether Kazakhstan should build a nuclear power plant but has yet to set a date for the vote.
Written in English by Chris Rickleton based on reporting by Maqpal Mukankyzy
