The Caspian Sea, the largest inland body of water on Earth, is shrinking. Not fluctuating, not entering another natural cycle, but shrinking.

For decades, scientists and policymakers treated changes in the Caspian as part of the basin’s natural variability. Water levels in the sea have always risen and fallen.

But our new study shows something far more troubling: the current decline is increasingly driven by human decisions to dam and divert rivers, and by fragmented decision-making across five countries that border this body of water.

Using satellite observations together with ground-based hydrological records from rivers across all five shoreline states (Iran, Russia, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan), we found that flow into the Caspian Sea has declined sharply over the past three decades.

The main reason is not declining rainfall. In fact, rain over the Volga Basin, which supplies roughly 80% of the Caspian’s inflow, has slightly increased. That finding matters because it overturns one of the most common assumptions surrounding the Caspian crisis. The common narrative has been straightforward: climate change increases evaporation, rainfall declines, and the sea shrinks.

Climate change certainly plays a role: our analysis confirms that evaporation across the Caspian has increased significantly as regional temperatures rise. But evaporation alone explains only about 40% of the observed water loss since the mid-1990s.

The remaining decline points overwhelmingly toward human activity. The Volga River has been heavily engineered for decades. Dams, reservoirs, use for irrigation, industrial consumption and navigation systems have fundamentally altered the hydrology of the basin).

Water that once flowed naturally into the Caspian is increasingly intercepted upstream. One critical but rarely discussed example is the Volga–Don canal system, which links the Caspian basin to the Black Sea through Russia’s internal waterways. Geopolitically and economically, the canal is strategically valuable. But it diverts water away from the Caspian system.

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The cumulative effect is now visible from space. Since the mid-1990s, the Caspian Sea has lost roughly 24,000km² of surface area, an area approaching the size of Sicily. Water levels have fallen by about two metres.

The shallow northern Caspian, ecologically one of the most productive parts of the sea, is drying particularly rapidly. This matters because the northern Caspian is not empty water. It is a critical ecological zone supporting fisheries, wetlands, migratory birds and spawning grounds for sturgeon, the ancient fish species that produce most of the world’s caviar.

Threats to shipping

As water retreats, ecological stress intensifies. Our study also detected a long-term rise in chlorophyll-a concentrations in the northern Caspian, a key indicator of algal activity and declining water quality. In plain terms, the sea is becoming warmer, shallower and increasingly nutrient-rich: ideal conditions for harmful algal blooms.

This is not merely an environmental story. The Caspian region sits at the centre of major energy and trade corridors linking Europe and Asia). Russia’s north-south transport routes and China’s international development plan, the Belt and Road Initiative, plus offshore oil infrastructure and regional shipping networks all depend on the Caspian remaining navigable and stable.

Falling water levels threaten ports, shipping lanes and coastal infrastructure. Declining depths reduce cargo capacity and increase transport costs. What appears initially as an environmental issue gradually becomes an economic constraint.

The Caspian Sea region

Political problems

Then there is the political dimension. Unlike oceans, inland seas cannot rely on global circulation to buffer local mismanagement. Their survival depends directly on the behaviour of neighbouring states. And the Caspian is surrounded by countries with competing strategic interests, uneven governance systems and limited transparency over their water use.

That fragmentation has become one of the greatest risks facing the sea. Although regional agreements exist, including the 2018 Aktau Convention (formally the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea), there is still no comprehensive and enforceable system governing water allocation, hydrological monitoring or ecological protection across the basin. Data sharing remains limited. Water withdrawals are often opaque. Environmental management is fragmented.

This resembles a pattern seen repeatedly across modern environmental crises: governments prefer to discuss climate change because it externalises responsibility. It allows leaders to portray ecological decline as an unavoidable planetary process.

But the Caspian story is more uncomfortable than that. It is also a story about political choices. Rivers were dammed. Water was diverted. Wetlands were degraded. Pollution controls remained weak. Oil and gas development expanded while ecological safeguards lagged behind. Economic growth consistently outranked hydrological sustainability.

The danger is not simply that the Caspian shrinks, but that ecological thresholds may be crossed – beyond which, recovery becomes extraordinarily difficult.

The Aral Sea, the world’s fourth largest lake, demonstrated how quickly collapse can accelerate once a chain reaction begins. Exposed lakebeds generate dust storms. Fisheries collapse. Salinity rises. Biodiversity crashes. Local climates shift. Economic systems unravel around the drying basin.

The Caspian has not yet reached that stage – but the warning signs are becoming increasingly visible.

There is still time to slow the trajectory. However, doing so would require something historically rare in the region: long-term coordination that prioritises hydrological stability – safeguarding the sea’s natural water balance and keeping water levels from dropping past a dangerous point of ecological collapse – over short-term extraction and geopolitical competition.

This would mean transparent water accounting – the open tracking and sharing of data on exactly how much water each nation is pulling from the feeding rivers for agriculture and industry. It would mean negotiated environmental flow releases from upstream reservoirs, and recognition that the Caspian is not simply an energy corridor or a shipping route, but a fragile water system.

Nature eventually imposes consequences on societies that ignore those limits. The Caspian Sea is beginning to deliver that message.

A decade on, it’s becoming clear that something about Brexit has eaten away at our minds.

When you think about the main legacies of the vote, you might come up with that massive spike in immigration. And the blue passports, of course. The economy took a hit too, though we don’t know exactly how big since the EU withdrawal lined up perfectly with Covid and the Ukraine war.

But there’s another thing that I believe the big split has done to this country, and it’s a lot more insidious.

Brexit has given us all a taste for political chaos. We can’t help ourselves.

And when I say ‘ourselves’, I might be talking about the crowd of political reporters to which I belong. But inevitably it has seeped out to affect ordinary members of the public, too.

In that context, it’s entirely fitting that we’re marking the tenth anniversary of the vote to leave the European Union with the sixth prime ministerial departure in that same timespan.

You have to go a long way back in British history to find the last time anything similar happened. Clearly, that vote on June 23 2016 has had some sort of impact on our brains.

Brexit itself was only directly responsible for two of those exits, of course. Cameron wouldn’t deliver it, and May couldn’t deliver it. With Johnson, you can take your pick of the scandals. Truss ‘Liz Trussed’ the economy. And Sunak did it the old-fashioned way, by losing an election.

With the latest Downing Street casualty, things are a little more complex.

It’s difficult to pin the downfall of Sir Keir Starmer on any single thing. The Mandelson controversy was significant, but past PMs have recovered from similar. Early setbacks like the freebies scandal could have applied to many of his predecessors.

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has climbed to a comfortable lead at the top of the polls under his watch – but there’s a while to go before the next scheduled general election.

There was plenty of criticism over policy (winter fuel, inheritance tax, national insurance for employers) and Starmer’s personal popularity was historically bad, but you’d have to go back to Thatcher and Blair for PMs who were forced out for those reasons. And they both had 10 years.

It’s hard to shake the sense Starmer’s demise is based largely on vibes, and a gradual piling-up of many smaller things.

To be clear, much of that is fair – many Labour MPs didn’t like the culture of his Downing Street or his approach to running the country, and didn’t trust him to get the government out of its hole. More ministers have resigned under him than any other PM since 1979 at this point in their term.

The lack of trust, lack of faith, and lack of cohesion appears to have fed through to the public at large.

But even so, would the country be quite so willing to overthrow its leader after less than two years in power if we hadn’t become so accustomed to it over the past 10 years?

You could argue, at least, that we’re not as bothered by the prospect of unleashing political pandemonium as we once were. How could it possibly be worse than the turmoil post-Brexit?

I don’t know what the UK would have done with a Prime Minister like Keir Starmer before the EU referendum took place a decade ago tomorrow. Perhaps things would have fallen apart in a similar way – all those mistakes would have chipped away at the authority of anyone else in his position.

However, it’s evidently more dangerous to mess things up in a Parliament that has developed a regicide habit. That may be something for Andy Burnham to keep in mind.

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A ten-year anniversary is a good opportunity to look back on an important decision. Whether that was a marriage, a career move or a decision to leave the EU, a decade feels like an important moment for reflection.

When the UK voted (narrowly) for Brexit on June 23 2016, nobody really knew what would happen next. After all, it had never been done before.

So, what versions of leaving the EU were available at that time?

One option was for the UK to leave the EU but remain in the single market, like Norway. Or there was the chance to follow a more radical path and seek to mirror the economic example of Singapore. Another alternative was to move for much greater alignment with the US, like Canada or Mexico.

None of these things happened – but what if they had?

The Singapore version

Turning the UK into “Singapore-on-Thames” would have seen Brexit turn to an economic model of low taxes and light regulation. This radical-but-simple idea called for global unilateral free trade, with the UK removing tariffs so it could buy the cheapest possible goods and services from all around the world.

As one of its key proponents acknowledged, this option would have marked the end of most UK manufacturing. There would have been no need for a car factory in Sunderland or British steel plants, when both products could be made much cheaper elsewhere.

Nor would there be much need for British farmers, other than for produce that is cheaper to source in the UK, like root vegetables and cabbages.

But importing cheap goods might have provided the UK economy with a valuable opportunity to specialise in sectors such as financial services, AI or bio-technology.

A similar thing happened to the UK after China’s exports started to fill the world when it joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. It has even been argued that Chinese imports helped British firms produce more affordable goods and services – and so created more jobs than they destroyed.

If it worked, Singapore-on-Thames would have had a genuine competitive advantage in a world stuck in escalating trade wars. And the UK economy would be driven by new technologies, delivering much-needed growth.

But it also would have been incredibly risky. The UK’s largest trading partner, the EU, has strict regulations on product safety and rules of origin. It is likely that unilateral-free-trade Britain would only be able to export its services and intellectual property. And Donald Trump would have probably tried to punish the UK for trading freely with China.

UK citizens would also need to be comfortable with foreign standards on health and safety, including for food (like chlorinated chicken) – or, indeed, no standards at all.

But in terms of potential gains from Brexit, this is probably the only version that would have provided the possibility of economic benefits over EU membership.

The Norway way

This option, often described as a “soft Brexit”, would have focused on the gains of sovereignty on non-economic issues while minimising the economic costs. The prospect of being more like Norway was even floated by Nigel Farage.

As members of the European Economic Area (EEA), the UK would own its own fish, sign its own trade deals and not be bound by further EU integration. But it would also continue to trade almost as before with its neighbours.

In some ways, this Brexit would have been the easiest one. EEA membership involves following EU rules and regulations without having a say on them, but this is largely what the UK has done since Brexit anyway.

Following Norway could have made the UK a richer and more efficient country. All of the time and energy that British politicians and civil servants now spend on finding ways to work with the EU could have been redirected to domestic policies.

British industries would now be busy with Europe’s rearmament effort as Norway’s already are. They would have first-tier access to the EU’s new €150 billion (£130 billion) defence fund – into which the UK can, in reality, only negotiate in piecemeal fashion.

British supermarkets and manufacturers would be seamlessly plugged into ever more integrated European supply chains, while tourists from the UK could cross EU borders easily.

However, as much as EEA membership gives access to the single market, it is not quite the same access that EU members enjoy. In some ways, the Norwegian version is just a bit boring. The UK would have lost some of the benefits of EU membership in exchange for some (mostly symbolic) sovereignty.

American dream

The paths to a Singaporian or Norwegian version of Brexit are effectively still available. But the world has changed so much since 2016 that many assumptions made back then are now way past their expiry date.

For example, the referendum was held during a time of extremely cordial relations between Europe and the US. Since 2011, the two blocs had been working on a trade and investment partnership, and Barack Obama was an incredibly popular figure in Europe.

If the 2016 US election had gone differently, it’s easy to imagine Brexit Britain having become a valuable bridge between the two continents. The UK could have been a booming financial hub, helping Europe and the US find their joint interests. The UK could have tried to be like Canada or Mexico, part of the North American free trade area, while also seeking close relations with Europe.

But with President Trump’s views on tariffs and Europe, this scenario is simply not available anymore.

The actual version

Instead of these alternatives, Brexit ended up following the path of least resistance.

Former prime minister Theresa May started out by setting up the UK’s red lines of leaving all European institutions. Her successor, Boris Johnson, formalised them in a withdrawal agreement, which was then softened by Rishi Sunak.

More recently, the current prime minister, Keir Starmer, has started a process to rejoin some EU agreements such as veterinary rules and the academic exchange programme Erasmus+.

Meanwhile, the UK has sent envoys to sign a raft of new trade agreements with the likes of Australia, New Zealand and India. But almost everywhere they went, they found a group of EU officials busy negotiating similar deals.

Even with these British trade deals, most analysis finds that the UK is now between 4% and 8% poorer than if it had remained in the EU.

More British voters appear to believe in ghosts (36%) than think, in hindsight, that Brexit was a good idea (30%). But while some wish to rejoin the EU, the tradeoffs today are different from ten years ago.

The need for a common security policy on military procurement has become acute, because all of Europe faces a common threat from Russia.

The reality of Brexit has also made Europeans more confident in the EU, and the bloc more open to bespoke deals. In 2016, only 33% of European citizens trusted the EU. Now, 51% of them do – much more than they do their own governments. Eurosceptic parties in France and Italy have changed their discourse.

Then there is the cost of borrowing money, which is much more expensive now than it was in 2016.

Arguably, one of the most frustrating features of governing Britain today is that the bond markets have made doing so a very expensive business. Further EU integration instead of Brexit could have made borrowing cheaper, to the extent that some have suggested the UK should start borrowing in euros, even without adopting the currency.

But the EU also misses Britain. While there is consensus in Europe that increasing the freedom to trade within the old continent is a priority to keep its economic relevance, the UK is missing from the table to make that happen.

If a British prime minister ever sits down in Brussels to negotiate rejoining, voters will be told the price in detail. The UK would have time to redefine its place in Europe, and try to reshape it in its image.

The other option – staying out – still has no definitive price tag attached to it. No one was honest enough to discuss what leaving the EU really meant – which may be why, ten years on, the ghost of Brexit still haunts UK politics.

Here is Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation speech in full: “Thank you. Thank you. Walking up this street two years ago was the proudest moment of my life. A new Labour government. The first in 14 years. A page in our country’s history turned after years of disappointment and despair.

“The chance to change the lives of millions of people for the better. That’s what I came into politics for. The journey to that point was not easy. Six years ago, I inherited a Labour Party that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt. I was told, time and time again, that my party was finished.

“That we were consigned to history, that a majority at the general election, let alone a landslide majority, was impossible. But we proved those people wrong because we changed our party. Ripping out the poison of antisemitism, restoring trust on the economy, defence, and national security.

“And becoming a party that, once again, stood proudly with, not against, our national flag. The hard work of change was with a singular purpose. Not power for power’s sake but to change Britain for the better.

“To build a fairer country, with dignity and respect, where everyone is seen, everyone is valued. Wealth and opportunity for all, not just the privileged few. And look at what we’ve achieved in just two years.

“An economy that is stronger, growing faster than our peers. Wages rising faster than inflation in every single month since we came to power. Investment secured, infrastructure being built. An end to austerity, with the fastest fall in NHS waiting lists for 17 years.

“The biggest improvement in rights for workers and renters in a generation. The biggest uplift in defence spending since the Cold War. Small boat crossings falling, asylum hotels closing, protecting young people from social media, and half a million children being lifted out of poverty because of the choices that I made.

“Our reputation in the world restored, with Britain once again standing up for decency, respect and the rule of law. Securing trade dues, standing with Ukraine, standing up for our values, and rebuilding our relationship with our allies in Europe. Change promised by a Labour government. Change fought for by a Labour government, change delivered by a Labour government.

“But I know the question being asked now is not who was best placed to change the Labour Party, to take us into power, and to begin the vital work of improving lives for millions of people. Those questions have been answered.

“The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election. I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question. And I accept that answer with good grace.

“Every decision I’ve taken has been about putting the country I love first. That is why I will resign as leader of the Labour Party. I have spoken to His Majesty the King this morning to inform him of my decision.

“I will ask the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party to set out a timetable with nominations opening on the 9th of July and completed by the summer recess. In the case of a contest, this will ensure a new leader is in place before Parliament returns in September.

“I will remain in post as Prime Minister until the contest is complete. And I will do everything I can to ensure an orderly handover of power. I will also give my successor my full and unequivocal support, knowing that they will inherit a Britain that is far stronger and fairer than the one I inherited two years ago, better prepared for the challenges ahead, and better able to ensure the Labour Party secures a second term in office.

“I want to thank all of those friends and colleagues who have been at my side for these past six years or so for their incredible commitment, service and support. I want to thank the brilliant Number 10 staff and our country’s extraordinary civil service, who dedicate their lives to public service.

“And when I leave, the biggest job in the country. I shall spend more time on the most important job. Being the best husband I can to my fantastic wife, Vic, who has been a rock by my side, through good times and bad. And being the best dad I can to my beautiful children, who are my pride and my joy. Thank you very much.”

Police captured a man on CCTV that they would like to speak to about the assault

A man suffered facial injuries after being assaulted. The victim was assaulted in Broad Street, Stamford, near Peterborough, at around 10.50pm on Friday, May 29.

Lincolnshire Police would like to speak to a man captured on CCTV who may be able to help with their enquiries. A police spokesperson said: “The man is described as having a slim build, grey hair and spoke with a soft West Midlands accent.”

Anyone with information should email PC Jamie Flint at jamie.flint@lincs.police.uk and quote crime number 26000316092 in the subject line.

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