Over six thousand flooded houses, over 117 thousand evacuated residents, the emergency regime in ten regions of the country, seven deaths – these are the results of the unprecedented flood in Kazakhstan. Ecologists and climatologists relate it to the global climate change and warn that floods, droughts, and other natural disasters could become permanent in Kazakhstan.
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Kazakhstan has not seen such massive and destructive floods as in 2024 in the last 80 years. Specialists in water resources tend to believe that the reason of anomalous floods is a large amount of winter precipitation and unusually warm March, which caused rapid snowmelt. The saturated and scattered frozen soil could not absorb a large amount of thawing water and all the water flew into rivers causing them to burst their banks.
Renata Sadrtdinova, flood risk engineer, who studies the condition of water resources of Kazakhstan, is convinced that the main reason of the snowy winter and anomalous warm March is the global climate change and this flood is only the forerunner of future disasters.
“Climate change will aggravate the existing problems, mainly floods and droughts,” said Renata Sadrtdinova. “In the last decade, many researches were published by climatologists, who forecast climate changes by 2050 and 2100. According to forecasts, the entire territory of Kazakhstan is expecting the rise in temperature by 7 Celsius degrees by 2100. Moreover, very wet regions, such as eastern and northern Kazakhstan, will face increase in precipitation, while dry regions such as Mangistau region will face droughts like the one that happened in 2021.”
The key reason of climate change, according to the expert, is the anthropogenic factor: emissions of pollutants into the atmosphere have hastened the climate change processes many times. “Climate would change without human participation, but at a much slower pace,” Sadrtdinova said.
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Is it possible to get prepared to such disasters? According to Kuralai Yahieva, climate change expert and coordinator of public foundation “Water Partnership of Kazakhstan”, scientists raised alarm 10-15 years ago and current anomalous floods are nothing else but the result of inattention of officials to the environmental issues.
“Kazakhstan is a very big country; we have woods, plains, mountains, so we need to take comprehensive measures to adapt to climate change and develop a particular scientific approach,” Yahieva said.
She reminded that Kazakhstan took part in big conferences on climate change, signed conventions, protocols related to water, so the government should be aware of the problem. But administrations of state bodies responsible for water reservoirs change very often.
“In 2020, we had a state programme on water resource management, but it had to be reapproved and related events had to be revised many times because the water resource committee was transferred from one ministry to another one. Thus, the events scheduled from 2020 to 2024 were not carried out. If all works under the programme were carried out in time, we could have avoided many problems.”
According to Kuralai Yahieva, the flood timing in Kazakhstan has shifted due to climate change, and now floods occur earlier than they usually do.
“The flood was expected in April, and they released water from reservoirs in March, and were getting prepared for spring flood,” the scientist said. “Now the flood begins in late March, which means that water should be released from reservoirs in January-February. Therefore, the first thing needed to do is to study the hydrology of all Kazakhstan’s rivers and revise the regime of reservoirs based on climate change and then, given the scientific studies, to prepare for further natural disasters.”
Renata Sadrtdinova also spoke about the similar problem: “The climate will be changing, especially in such regions as Kazakhstan because we have a high rate of emissions of such substances as methane and carbon dioxide. But I do not see that the government is handling this problem at all.”
Nevertheless, the government regularly speaks about climate change and declares the willingness to reduce emission of hazardous pollutants into the atmosphere. In December 2023, minister of ecology and natural resources of Kazakhstan Yerlan Nysanbaev estimated the scope of the climate change threat and said that Kazakhstan was taking measures “to perform its obligations and keep up with the general global trend to reduce the use of the fossil fuels.”
“The climate has changed. And this process is reversible, according to specialists, if we keep climate change or air temperature rise on the planet Earth [at the level] not exceeding 1.5-2 degrees. Today states do understand that this problem is threatening the existence of all human beings. Therefore, we, having historically been using the fuel fossils in large amounts, need to move in this direction very cautiously. But at the same time we can ensure sustainable development of our economy,” Nysanbaev said.
As part of its efforts towards climate change prevention, Kazakhstan cooperates with many international organisations and has undertaken obligations to achieve Sustainable Development Goals, ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the Paris Agreement. It adopted the Strategy for Achieving Carbon Neutrality by 2060 in 2023 and the revised Nationally Determined Contribution until 2030.