Before and after satellite photos show a horrifying vision of the future and evidence of man’s destruction of the natural environment.

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Taken over nearly 40 years, photographs show the drying up of several bodies of water around the world – receding as mankind’s demand for water grows.Expert Dr Benjamin Lloyd-Hughes of the Walker Institute for climate system research, University of Reading, has spoken of the devastating effects on local populations caused by the impacts of mankind combined with climate change.

Included in the shocking collection is the once mighty Aral Sea in Central Asia.The expanse of water, like several others across the globe, has been reduced to worryingly sparse levels.

In April the situation at the Aral Sea was described as “one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters” by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.Shown here in images taken from space between 1973 and 2009, slowly but surely the Aral – in fact a salt water lake – has shrunk from being the size of Ireland to a cluster of contaminated ponds

An inland lake, the Aral is found between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and used to be the fourth largest lake in the world. Since the 1960s, it has lost more than half of its volume.The drying is due to overuse of the lake’s feeder rivers. In the 1960s the former Soviet Union diverted the Syr Darya and Amu Darya for the irrigation of cotton and paddy fields.Now 50 years later the water is at a dismal 10 per cent of its level when the projects first began.

So great was the impact on the region the local climate was thought to have changed and pollution has risen to dangerous levels.The destruction of the lake has also decimated the local fishing industry, causing severe knock-on unemployment and further economic woe for the people living around it.Across the globe once rich and fertile lands are facing the same catastrophe.

Also included in the before-and-after pictures are the Toshka Lakes, in southern Egypt.They were formed in the 1990s by diverting water from Lake Nasser, an artificial lake formed behind the Aswan High Dam on the river Nile.One image taken in March  2001, shows the lakes near their maximum capacity.A later satellite picture from December 2005 shows how the waters receded due to drought and rising demand for water, leaving a ring of brown wetlands around the edges of the lakes.

“The outlook is that there will be no change in rainfall but temperature could increase by another two degrees Centigrade by 2100. This is not good but not so bad as for the Aral Sea and Mesopotamia.“Global warming is a problem that is happening everywhere but if drought is happening in your region then it is a far greater problem.”

With the growth of mass-agriculture to feed a severely ballooning global population, water demand has begun to perilously outstrip supply, making disasters like the Aral Sea a grim and alarming likelihood for the future.