In Central Asia, there are many saline lakes, both small and large. They range in salinity from <3 g/L to >l00 g/L. The paper provides a summary review of their major physico-chemical and biological features of Caspian Sea, Aral Sea, lakes Balkhash, Issyk-Kul, Alakol and Tengiz. Several are threatened by human activities in their drainage basins, particularly diversion of inflowing waters.

The present review paper outlined the history of how various types of desertification/land degradation were originated regionally, intensified, and spread to a larger area in the agricultural history and climate change over the past hundred thousand years. Region-specific methods of agriculture were invented fitting in with the local natural resources and developed in the sequence characterized by each of major climo-vegetation types in the world (forest, woodland, and grassland/desert), whereas the corresponding region-specific types of desertification occurred if agricultural impacts exceeded the resilience of the natural resources. Also, they occurred when the agricultural methods were transferred to different climo-vegetation regions owing to the mismatch with the new environment. Thus, a countermeasure against desertification, that was produced in a climo-vegetation region, is potentially transferable to the same type of region.