The Aral Sea Basin is situated between 55°00’ E and 78°20’ E and between 33°45’ N and 51°45’ N.

The Aral Sea Basin has a total area of 2.7 million km2 and it is shared by seven countries: Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth largest inland sea. Problems began in the 1960s and 1970s with the diversion of the inflowing Amu Dar’ya and Syr Dar’ya rivers in order to grow cotton on arid land in what was then Soviet Central Asia. Ninety-four water reservoirs and 24,000 km of channels were constructed on these two rivers to support the irrigation of 7 million ha of agricultural land.
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Wetlands include a wide variety of habitats such as marshes, peatlands, floodplains, rivers and lakes, and coastal areas such as saltmarshes, mangroves, and seagrass beds, but also coral reefs and other marine areas no deeper than six metres at low tide, as well as human-made wetlands such as waste-water treatment ponds and reservoirs.

The Convention on Wetlands is an intergovernmental treaty adopted on 2 February 1971 in the Iranian city of Ramsar. Thus, though nowadays the name of the Convention is usually written ‘Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar, Iran, 1971)’, it has come to be known popularly as the ‘Ramsar Convention’. Its mission is ‘the conservation and wise use of all wetlands through local, regional and national actions and international cooperation, as a contribution towards achieving sustainable development throughout the world.
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Migration is considered one of the defining global issues of the early 21st century, as more and more people are on the move today than at any other point in human history.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that now there are about 192 million people living outside their place of birth, which is about 3% of the world’s population. From these migrants, there are at least 25 million environmental refugees.
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Water governance is defined by the political, social, economic and administrative systems that are in place, and which directly or indirectly affect the use, development and management of water resources and water service delivery at different levels of society.

The water crisis is essentially a crisis of governance and societies are facing a number of social, economic and political challenges on how to govern water more effectively.
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