Coastal tourism without a coast: rethinking sustainable tourism on the receding shores of the Aral Sea under climate change

<jats:p>The scholarly discussion of tourism, climate change, and human mobility on the coasts has so far been confined to small island developing states (SIDS) and low-lying littorals at risk of flooding by rising seas. The present Brief Research Report aims to extend this literature by examining its conceptual inverse, the Aral Sea, where the coastline was not submerged but abandoned by the withdrawal of water, and where climate change compounds a desiccation initially driven by irrigation policy. Formerly the world's fourth largest lake, the Aral lost about 90 percent of its volume owing to the Soviet-era drainage of its feeder rivers, leaving behind the Uzbek fishing port city of Moynaq a 100 km inland and opening up the Aralkum, the world's youngest desert. Through a desk study analysis based on peer-reviewed literature, institutional reports, satellite imagery and tourism data, the present report (i) conceptualizes the declining water level in a novel way, namely as a “coast without a coast”; (ii) highlights the region's new tourism attractions (the ship graveyard in Moynaq, the Aral Sea Museum, the Stihia Festival, and seabed afforestation) within the context of dark tourism, disaster tourism, last-chance tourism and ecotourism; and (iii) compares the Aral experience with the SIDS coastal phenomenon. We posit that desiccated inland seas open up an avenue for studying coastal tourism issues that go beyond climate-induced sea-level rise, and that in the case of the Aral Sea, “come and see what has already disappeared” calls for governance based on regeneration rather than disaster tourism.</jats:p>