2024 edition

winner

Anush Babajanyan

Battered Waters

website

The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s left the countries of Central Asia struggling with environmental issues and a lack of coordination around the water they shared. In urgency to address the region’s water crisis and visualize water management problems, I traveled to four countries in Central Asia, where upstream Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan control the flow of this region’s two major rivers into Uzbekistan and water-thirsty Kazakhstan. The 67 million people living in the landlocked area of Central Asia, which is about the size of Europe, depend on its rivers and glaciers for the precious resource of water. At the same time, the changing climate increases the challenges facing all four nations. This project tells the narrative of the environmental problems in this often-overlooked region, through its people and nature, in consequences of climate change already happening.

The jury consisting of

Patricia Franceschetti
Elena Boille
Antonio Carloni
Jim Casper
Gloria Crespo MacLennan
Carol Körting
Steven Lee

 

has selected the following finalist projects:

 

High fire in the forest’s heart – Alisa Martynova
Dias Eternos – Ana María Arévalo Gosen
Battered Waters di Anush Babajanian
Russia-Ukraine War: A Conflict of Past and Future Identities – Emanuele Satolli
South Sudan: The Identity of the World’s Youngest Country – Fabio Bucciarelli
LOST MEMORIES – Giulio Piscitelli
Las Pelilargas – Irina Werning
Sangre Blanca – The Lost War on Cocaine – Mads Nissen
Et Moriente Mori – The Great Lakes War – Marco Gualazzini
In the Shadow of Noah – Mustafa Bilge Satkin
The Final Days of Georgian Nomads – Natela Grigalashvili
Mapuche the return of the ancient voices – Pablo Ernesto Piovano
In The Faded Forest Sounds the Call of a Bird – Sarah Pabst
Inside Myanmar’s Armed Revolution – Siegfried Modola
Orphans – Valerio Bispuri

 

 

in collaboration with
  • Kyrgyzstan: A source of the Naryn River, the glacier Zapadnyy Suek holds the future of the water system in four Central Asian countries. This glacier and other frozen water sources in this region are melting as the climate changes, and mismanagement of water resources leads towards a precarious future.
  • Kyrgyzstan: The population of this country, including the numerous villages along the Naryn River, such as Ak-Kyya village, depend on Naryn for the country’s 40 percent of electricity.
  • Kyrgyzstan: Naryn River depends on snow and rains just as well as glacial runoff. The river has received less precipitation in recent years, which has lowered its amount of water flowing into neighboring downstream countries.
  • Kyrgyzstan: Jaynagul Brjieva, 37, and her family enjoy an outing to a hot spring in Kaji-Say, Kyrgyzstan. This is both an opportunity to bathe her children in warm water and to take advantage of its healing qualities, a unique opportunity for people in a region contending with water shortages.
  • Kyrgyzstan: The city of Kara-Köl was built to accommodate people arriving here to construct the Toktogul dam in the 1960s. A mural on one of its residential buildings depicts Naryn River flowing into the Toktogul Reservoir.
  • Kyrgyzstan: The home of Nurislam Gainutdinov, 72, and his family has been heavily affected by the fluctuating water levels of Kyrgyzstan’s Toktogul Reservoir, controlled by a dam. Nurislam had to move his house up the shoreline in 2010. But the water now decreased, having approached a critical low level in Spring 2021. Its waters continue farther south into Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in the form of Naryn and then Syr Darya Rivers, where the water is highly needed for irrigation.
  • Kyrgyzstan: A widower and former photographer Nurislam Gainutdinov lives alone on the shore of Toktogul Reservoir, never knowing how the water mismanagement will affect the area where he lives.
  • Kyrgyzstan: Sonunbek Kadyrov’s boat serves the village Kyzyl-Beyit, as a taxi. Access to this village’s main road was covered by water over 20 years ago as the Kurpsayskaya dam was built, in a case when inefficient water management heavily complicated people’s movement.
  • Kazakhstan: A hot spring has emerged on the former bed of the Aral Sea, near Akespe village, and is often visited for healing purposes. Over the years the Aral Sea has lost 90 percent of its waters. Shared by Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, this formerly fourth largest lake in the world began to retreat in the 1960s, with the Soviet project of diverting the rivers Syr Darya and Amu Darya to serve the cotton industry.
  • Kazakhstan: Inhabitants of Akespe village make a living by breeding camels on the seabed of the Aral, now a desert, and keeping a boat they use for fishing in what remains of the sea. Sandstorms are making families like that of Aybergen Orazmagambetov, 11, move away from the area to a new neighborhood even farther from the seashore.
  • Kazakhstan: A mosaic in an abandoned building in Mirny, Kazakhstan, depicts waves on nearby Lake Balkhash. Like the Aral Sea, the lake – one of the largest in Asia – is shrinking due to the diversion of water from rivers that feed it for agriculture and industry.
  • Tajikistan: Trees grow on the former bottom of Zeravshan River, here at its beginnings in Tajikistan. Its glacier has retreated for nearly a kilometer in the last 20 years. The Zeravshan River is a former tributary of the Amu Darya, but its water no longer reaches Amu Darya because it is diverted through canals in Uzbekistan.
  • Tajikistan: The Rogun hydropower plant is currently under construction, and is a giant project initiated by Tajikistan, in order to provide electricity not only to its citizens, but to also sell it to neighboring countries. The government hopes to reduce electricity shortage in rural areas with the help of the hydropower plant.
  • Tajikistan: When the construction of the Rogun Dam is completed, planned for 2025, its height will be 335 meters and it will be the highest of its kind.
  • Tajikistan: With Norak reservoir seen in the background, Ranobi Islomova, 63, who is ill, waits in a car to continue her trip to a neighboring town. The reservoir was formed by the Norak Dam, the tallest in Tajikistan.
  • Tajikistan: The water of Syr Darya is abundantly used for rice farming. In Tajikistan’s Sughd region, these fields do not receive enough water through canals connected to the major river. As in most cases, women are the ones working in the field, being paid only four dollars a day.
  • Tajikistan: An inhabitant of the village Istiqlol rests by the river Vakhsh. A greenhouse built along the river uses its water to grow cucumbers. The river Vakhsh flows into the river Amu Darya.
  • Uzbekistan: A shrimp farmer squeezes excess water out of a bag filled with Artemia salina brine shrimp, beside the Aral Sea, in Uzbekistan. Farming this shrimp that breeds in waters with high salinity, is a growing industry along the receded shores of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. The numbers of this unique crustacean grew by the sea as its waters retreated and its salinity increased.
  • Uzbekistan: 18-year-old Dinara and her younger relative, on Dinara's wedding day in Muynak, a former sea port in Uzbekistan, on October 27, 2019. Dinara's grandparents were employed within the formerly thriving fishing industry of Muynak. Her family is still dependent on the Aral Sea, as both her father and her husband work by the sea as Artemia Salina farmers.
  • Uzbekistan: The abundant silt in the river Amu Darya, often gives the water a dark red color, an ominous look in the face of its gradual decrease of water levels. This historically important river, formerly known as the Oxus, and its battered waters, are further examples of water security touching every aspect of life in Central Asia.