Curb vast water use in central Asia

Struggling to shake off the Soviet legacy of environmental and political crises and oligarchies, these republics are more rivals than neighbours. Because most of the region's water bodies - mainly the Syr Darya, Amu Darya and Zarafshon rivers - are shared, political tensions have grown around water access, drawing worrying parallels with similar crises in the Arab world. Projected to cover almost half the area of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the synthetic lake will be about six times its volume. Since 2000, Turkmenistan has been constructing it, claiming it will increase agricultural production and offer a "symbol of revival of the Turkmen land", as former president Saparmurat Niyazov (known as Turkmenbashi) put it9.