Central Asia’s Climate Risks: Can Energy Diversification Help?

Climate change and efforts to mitigate it are affecting the water-energy nexus in Central Asia. Downstream countries – Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan – already experience water stress, and any further gap between water availability and demand would exacerbate water scarcity. This will negatively affect the region’s agriculture, security, and well-being. Water is also of crucial importance for the renewable energy transition in Central Asia. Hydropower development can contribute to satisfying the growing energy demand and help with balancing the intermittent energy sources provided by solar and wind power generation. The decarbonization commitments adopted by Central Asian states make tackling the interlinked challenges of water management and energy security even more pressing. Robust regional cooperation and governance mechanisms are necessary for meeting these challenges. The roundtable will focus on the issues of climate change vulnerability, the current state of the water-energy nexus, and the shortage and promise of regional cooperation in Central Asia. It will draw on the findings of the two recent reports published by the CAREC Institute: Sustainable Pathways to Energy Transition in the CAREC Region: A Governance Perspective (March 2022) and Water-Agriculture-Energy Nexus in Central Asia Through the Lens of Climate Change (August 2022).