Topic: Central Asia mountains ecosystem services

Natural disasters

Climate change could amplify the risk of floods, mudflows andlandslides in the mountains, including glacier-related hazards. There has been a series of glacial outburst floods in the mountains of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan,making it even more urgent to monitor these hazards. With the melting of glaciers, glacial lakes appear every summer in the mountains. Some of them grow significantly and, if contained by unstable moraines, they occasionally burst and release large amounts of water in destructive flash floods, sometimes with serious impacts on life and property. Almost 1 000 glacial lakes exist in the mountains of Central Asia. Annually, dozens of potentially risky glacial lakes appear in the mountainous areas above Almaty, Bishkek and Tashkent cities, around Lake Issyk-Kul and the densely populated Ferghana Valley, and in the narrow Pamir-Alai valleys. Experts suggest that climate change is likely to increase this number. There have already been deadly floods in the past 15 years, including in the Shahimardan (Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, 1998), Dasht(Tajikistan, 2002) and Issyk-Kul (2008) valleys.