OVERVIEW

 

Only about 10 percent of Uzbekistan's water originates inside the country. The rest flows down from the Tien Shan and Pamir glaciers through the Amu Darya and Syr Darya river basins, which the country shares with its upstream neighbors. That dependence sits at the center of every climate adaptation challenge Uzbekistan faces over the next decade. Temperatures in Central and West Asia are rising at 0.2 to 0.4 degrees per decade, faster than the global average, and current projections show more than half of the region's glacier volume could be lost by 2100. Uzbekistan's annual water shortage is projected to grow from current levels to seven billion cubic meters by 2030 and fifteen billion by 2050.

 

The Asian Development Bank's response is built around a regional adaptation programme of unusual scale. On 29 October 2025, the Green Climate Fund approved US$ 250 million for Glaciers to Farms, a flagship initiative led by ADB to build resilient water and agriculture systems across nine glacier-dependent countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. GCF's grant funding will be invested alongside US$ 3.25 billion from ADB over the next decade, taking total mobilisation up to US$ 3.5 billion. The programme focuses on four glacier-fed river basins: the Naryn and Pyanj in Central Asia, the Kura in the South Caucasus, and the Swat in Pakistan. Together they cover roughly 27 million hectares and support approximately 45 million people.

 

For Uzbekistan, the Pyanj basin matters most. It feeds the Amu Darya, which supplies more than two-thirds of the country's irrigation water and underpins the agricultural sector that employs nearly a quarter of the workforce. Under Glaciers to Farms, ADB will finance more efficient irrigation, water storage upgrades, and watershed management measures, alongside health infrastructure improvements in communities along the Pyanj that face rising risks from heatwaves and waterborne disease. The programme will also support climate and glacier assessments to inform national development planning, early warning systems for glacial lake outburst floods, and adaptive social protection schemes that extend to women-led agricultural businesses.

 

A DIGITAL BACKBONE FOR WATER MANAGEMENT

 

Glaciers to Farms operates alongside the Climate-Smart Water Management Improvement Project, which ADB approved in February 2025 with a US$ 125 million loan. The project supports Uzsuvtaminot, the national water utility, and its regional branches in completing a nationwide bulk flow metering and telemetry system. It will deliver an asset inventory and on-site geographic mapping for all water supply and wastewater infrastructure, covering roughly four million customer connections.

 

An integrated package of climate-smart IT systems will modernise the utility, with new financial management software bringing its accounts into line with international standards. The headline figure that drives the case for this work: nonrevenue water in Uzbekistan was recorded at around 20 percent in 2021, and only about 15 percent of regional water supply facilities had been fitted with bulk flow meters. The project closes that measurement gap.

 

REGIONAL COOPERATION AND A GREEN BOND

 

The institutional architecture surrounding these investments has shifted. Central Asia's five countries recently agreed a new water-sharing framework for the Syr Darya and Amu Darya, the two glacier-fed rivers that determine agricultural and energy output across the region. ADB is supporting implementation through the CAREC Water Pillar and a Strengthening Transboundary Water Collaboration project launched in January 2026. In parallel, the bank issued a US$ 100 million green bond earlier this year, targeted specifically at the risks of glacier melt in Central and West Asia. As ADB President Masato Kanda put it at Samarkand, "we are turning nature priorities into scalable, system-wide investments."

 

President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has also positioned Uzbekistan within a wider environmental architecture. The Yashyl Makon programme commits the country to planting 200 million trees a year, and the proposed Green Belt of Central Asia, announced at Samarkand, would extend coordinated reforestation across the region. Both initiatives sit alongside Uzbekistan's national target of 30 percent green coverage by 2030. ADB is structuring climate finance instruments to make these targets bankable, including support for the country's first sovereign sustainability-linked borrowing.

 

ADAPTATION AS ECONOMIC POLICY

 

The framing matters. Uzbekistan-2030 treats water security and climate adaptation as economic policy, on the basis that agricultural output, urban water supply, and hydropower generation all depend on glacier-fed flows that are now changing fast. Disaster losses in the country have averaged around US$ 92 million a year, equivalent to roughly 0.2 percent of GDP, and the figures rise sharply under most climate scenarios.

 

Acting now, at the scale Glaciers to Farms and the Climate-Smart Water Management Improvement Project make possible, is what allows the Uzbekistan-2030 growth path to remain credible. By 2030, the test will be whether the country has reduced its water deficit below current projections, whether four million customer connections sit inside a fully digitised utility, and whether the Pyanj and Amu Darya continue to deliver water security for the next generation of Uzbek farmers.