Water scarcity in Central Asia is moving up the value chain, and mining firms are next in line. This presentation examines how deteriorating water availability, tightening environmental scrutiny and transboundary river politics are converging into a material and underappreciated risk for the region's extractive sector.

Water scarcity in Central Asia has long been treated as an environmental or agricultural problem. It is increasingly a business problem. Across the region, deteriorating infrastructure, glacier retreat in the Tien Shan and Pamirs, and fragmented governance are translating into higher operating costs, production disruptions, and rising investment risk for private firms. Water inefficiency alone costs the region an estimated 1–3% of GDP annually, while firms in water-intensive sectors are absorbing cost increases of 5–15% simply to maintain reliable access to a resource that public pricing still treats as nearly free.

This ten-minute presentation focuses on the mining sector as a case in point. As water becomes scarcer and more contested across Central Asian river systems, extractive operations face a growing set of pressures: the cost of securing and treating their own water supply, stricter environmental scrutiny around how water is used and discharged on site, and exposure to upstream decisions, whether by governments or neighbouring industries, that can alter available water volumes with little notice. This is already shaping the cost base and risk profile of operations in the region. The presentation closes with a brief outlook on how the trajectory of regional water governance will determine how manageable these pressures become for the sector.