ALA ARCHA NATIONAL PARK, Kyrgyzstan – You can hear and feel the Adygene Glacier melting under the cloudless August sky.

Every step through the inch-and-a-half layer of snow reveals trickles running over the ice’s surface. Turquoise water roars as it plunges through deep, jagged channels down the slope.

Bakyt Ermenbaev crouches down and holds a measuring tape to the small PVC pipe sticking up from Adygene’s ice.

“Thirty-six centimeters,” Mr. Ermenbaev reads out as his colleague Gulbara Omorova notes it down. The pair of glaciologists affiliated with the Kyrgyz Institute of Water Problems and Hydropower had drilled the pipe about 15 feet into the glacier at the beginning of the month, and, in just 20 days, those 36 centimeters – or 14 inches – have melted.

It means the surface of the glacier has dropped 13 1/2 feet since last year, Ms. Omorova calculates. Which is fast. If the Adygene Glacier were healthy, you would expect about 3 to 6 feet of melt each year, she says.

Fifty years since the Soviets diverted the water of Central Asia’s great rivers to water cotton fields and doomed the Aral Sea, Central Asian states face a new and perhaps greater ecological threat. As climate change warms the region at double the global rate, the mountains’ snow and glaciers’ ice that feed those rivers are disappearing.

For two decades, management of the region’s mighty rivers, 30,000 miles of canals, and 80 major reservoirs, which zigzag across Central Asia’s scramble of borders, was a source of tension and distrust. Yet in the last few years, Central Asian leaders have turned the page on two decades of bickering over their shared water resources as the climate threat looms.

The region’s five states have signed historic border treaties, agreed to the joint control of major water projects, and brought a more level-headed approach to negotiations over who gets water, how much, and when.

“This is now the turning point to something much better,” says Volker Frobarth, ambassador to Kyrgyzstan for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe...

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