Abstract
The Aral Sea environmental crisis has been created by poor water management in the river basins of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. Nearly all the flow is abstracted for ailing irrigation schemes in the upper and middle basins, for massive river basin transfer schemes, or is lost to evaporation and seepage from reservoirs and canals. The only solution to the crisis in the lower deltas is to allow more water to flow to them. The paper argues that the only practical approach for achieving this in the short to medium term is better water management in the upper and middle river basins, and that a more rational basis for allocating water to meet the needs of all users is urgently required. The paper describes a real‐time water resources management model for the Syr Darya river that has been designed for sustainable planning and management of the water resources to meet the needs of all riparian users. The power and limitations of such models in relation to effective management of the water resources of the Aral Basin are discussed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.