Imagine living near the seaside your whole life, only for the ocean to literally walk away overnight. Residents along the Aral Sea have had decades to watch this environmental nightmare happen before ...

This story appears in the June 2015 issue of National Geographic magazine. “This is what the end of the world looks like,” says Yusup Kamalov, sweeping his hand toward the scrub-covered desert ...

This post is part of Global Voices’ May 2026 Spotlight series, “Global crisis, local solutions.” This series will offer stories of resistance and successful climate action, insight into how ...

Few environmental disasters illustrate the consequences of human mismanagement as starkly as the fate of the Aral Sea. Once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, the Aral Sea has lost ...

The coastline vanished from his village long before Kenzhetay Akseitov was born. With it went the fishing that had once been the backbone of the local economy, leaving the nearby salt works as the ...