More than 94 % of mountainous Kyrgyzstan's territory is located 1,000 meters above sea level, which makes it prone to natural disasters such as landslides, earthquakes, floods, and mudslides. The damage from these types of disasters costs the country some $35 million annually according to its Ministry of Emergency Situations.
In the recent past, Kyrgyzstan served as one of the USSR's most important sources of uranium and rare-earth metals. The mining enterprises, which began in the 1940s , left behind themselves enormous amounts of industrial waste, including radioactive materials. Some 6,500 hectares of land in Kyrgyzstan have been exposed to radioactive contamination. Kyrgyzstan now hosts 92 hazardous waste dumps holding 254 million cubic meters (475 million tons) of waste containing radionuclides and other toxic substances.
This volume of waste includes dormant mines, untreated tailing dumps, and untreated rock debris. According to rough estimates, the most urgent cleanup measures needed to render the tailings safety would cost up to $40 million.
Experts say the potential for environmental pollution from radioactive wastes in Kyrgyzstan is high and they have highlighted several factors that increase this risk:
- earthquakes — the region has seismic magnitude of 8−10;
- soil erosion processes typical to mountainous regions — floods, mudslides, and landslides;
- long-term lack of controls and reconstruction/maintenance engineering works at the tailing sites;
- location of most of the radioactive waste close to transboundary river basins, which creates a risk of contamination spreading across the Central Asian region.
As a result of current adverse social, economic, environmental and geographic factors in the region, there is a high risk of hazardous natural and anthropogenic processes. This may cause human, economic and social problems leading to the further stagnation of mining areas and threatening the sustainable development of the whole region.
The economic cost of all this can be measured as lost income because of the exhausted resources and potential threat of the hazardous waste to the health of the population. Today, information about the amount of hazardous waste in Kyrgyzstan is not reliable because of limited, patchy monitoring.
The proximity of most of the tailings and waste dumps to transboundary river basins (Naryn, Mailuu-Suu, Sumsar) is a significant factor affecting regional safety. There is a high risk of an ecological catastrophe that could potentially affect territories in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan with a total population of 5 million people.