Encompassing an area over 2.3 million km2, the Aral Sea basin was one of the largest economic regions of the former USSR. In the early 1960s, a program of extensive development of irrigated farming was launched using water from the Amudarya and Syrdarya, the largest Central Asian rivers flowing into the Aral Sea. By the mid-1970s and early 1980s, the intense use of the downstream flow resulted in the drying out of the riverbed in different seasons at a distance of about two hundred meters from the sea. This distance increased steadily at a rate of about 1 meter per year. The irrigated area in the mid-1980s had reached 6.8 million ha compared with 2.9 million ha in 1959. In the former USSR, 95% of the raw cotton and 40% of the rice was produced there. However, these Soviet attempts to conquer nature in the Aral region were accompanied by adverse environmental impacts. Steadily accumulating adverse impacts and their eventual interactions resulted in an environmental crisis in the early 1980s that evolved into an environmental disaster a few years later. As a result, the situation in the Aral Sea ranks among the largest human-induced environmental disasters in the twentieth century, in terms of geographic scope and degree of severity.

Water resource problems in the Priaralye region (the region around the Aral Sea) are a result of the diminution of the natural water supply to the Amudarya and Syrdarya deltas and their vegetation. The reduced water supply generated soil degradation, solonchak (saline soils) development on the newly exposed dry seabed, and large-scale salt and dust transport to adjacent areas, which have destabilized terrestrial ecosystems.