SEOUL, July 23 (AJP) - South Korea spent three days this week showing Turkmenistan how it manages water, hosting a government delegation from one of the world's driest countries as Seoul works to turn its water industry into an export business across Central Asia.
The visit, which ran Tuesday through Thursday in Seoul, brought officials from Turkmenistan's State Committee for Water Resources, the body overseeing the country's water policy and projects, along with its foreign ministry and the state institute handling water design and engineering. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment jointly hosted the program.
The two sides make an unlikely but logical pair. Turkmenistan is roughly four-fifths desert, covered by the Karakum, one of the largest sand deserts on earth, and depends for most of its water on a single river, the Amu Darya, shared with its neighbors. The Soviet-era Karakum Canal, among the longest irrigation canals in the world, carries that water more than 1,300 kilometers across the country, and much of it is lost to seepage and evaporation along the way. Climate change is tightening the squeeze. For a government in that position, technology that tracks canals, cuts losses and treats water is not an abstraction.
South Korea, for its part, has spent two decades building exactly that toolkit. K-water, the state water corporation, runs the national water system through a centralized digital operations center, and the country has pushed into AI-assisted purification, smart metering and remote monitoring. The delegation saw the showcase items: K-water's integrated operations center, the AI water purification plant in Hwaseong, south of Seoul, and the Gyeongin Ara Waterway connecting the Han River to the sea. The visitors also toured Korean companies specializing in canal monitoring and water treatment to examine how the technologies work in the field and discuss possible cooperation.
The trip follows the first Korea-Turkmenistan water industry mission, a public-private delegation the government sent last year, its first of the kind. That visit confirmed there was room to work together, the ministries said, and this week's program was designed to make the cooperation concrete.
Seoul is thinking beyond one country. The Turkmen visit ran alongside a smart water management training program for officials from all five Central Asian states, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, a region where water is both scarce and a chronic source of tension between upstream and downstream neighbors. The week included a multilateral meeting of the five governments on water industry cooperation, a seminar where each country shared its water policies and discussed sustainable management and climate response, and a business roundtable pairing Korean water companies with Central Asian government agencies.
The commercial intent is explicit. Kim Ho-eun, director general for water use policy at the climate ministry, said cooperation built up with Central Asian countries is now producing visible results, including supplies of Korean equipment and construction of facilities. "We will continue to lead the way in supporting our water companies' expansion overseas," Kim said.
The diplomatic runway extends to September, when South Korea plans to hold a summit with the five Central Asian states. Opening the multilateral meeting, Kyun Jong-ho, the foreign ministry's ambassador for climate change, said cooperation on sharing water policy and management experience matters more than ever, and expressed hope the discussions would carry into deeper cooperation at the summit.
The two ministries said they expect the week's program to deepen water cooperation with Turkmenistan and widen policy networks across Central Asia, and that they will keep supporting Korean water companies abroad while developing practical joint projects.
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