Dynamic changes in water resources and comprehensive assessment of water resource utilization efficiency in the Aral Sea basin, Central Asia

The Aral Sea Basin in Central Asia faces significant challenges in improving water utilization and treatment because of frequent transboundary river water disputes and shortages of water resources. However, the traditional water resource utilization efficiency (WRUE) assessment models generally have the defect of over-validating evaluation results. To solve this problem, this study used the Coefficient of Variation method to constrain the self-contained weights in the traditional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to construct an improved CV-DEA model, and assessed the WRUE of the Aral Sea Basin countries during 2000–2018 and compared the WRUE with that of the countries in the Mekong River Basin and Northeast Asia, then explored the factors influencing water utilization. The conclusions were drawn: since 1960, the runoff from the upper Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers increased significantly, while the runoff from the lower Amu Darya River into the Aral Sea declined. Meanwhile, the water area of the Aral Sea shrank from 2.56 × 104 km2 to 0.70 × 104 km2 in 2000–2018, with the Northern Aral Sea remaining stable while the southern part shrinking sharply. The WRUE of the Aral Sea Basin (0.599, on average) was higher than that of the Mekong River Basin (0.547) and lower than that of Northeast Asia (0.885). Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan had the highest WRUE of 0.819 and 0.685 respectively, and the WRUE in both two countries improved from 2000 to 2018. Tajikistan (0.495) and Turkmenistan (0.402) experienced decreases in WRUEs. The high input redundancy of agricultural water consumption was the main driving force affecting WRUE in the basin.