Iran is Dying of Thirst

You may have noticed some startling news reports about water shortages in Iran. In early November, Iranian President Mahsoud Pezeshkian announced that if there was no rain by December, Tehran might have to be evacuated.

CNN, Dec. 1, headlined, “Taps may run dry in this country, where the water crisis is so severe it can be seen from space.” The article is worth a look, if only for the nifty graphic that allows you to compare the Latyan Dam—about 9 miles from Tehran—as it looked in May, with how it looks now. It’s less than 10 percent full.

Iran has been suffering a six-year drought, but it is an arid and semi-arid country. It has been for millennia. That’s why the ancient Persians invented a method of delivering water through tunnels so it doesn’t evaporate from the highlands to agricultural areas. During the reign of Cyrus the Great, in the 6th century B.C., the qanat system was greatly expanded, and the desert bloomed. Now the water table has fallen so far that the vertical qanat shafts can’t reach the water.

Aquifers have also been depleted, and a country can’t just refill an aquifer. As it is drained, the weight of the earth above it causes the land to subside. In Tehran, land is sinking at almost 12 inches a year.

Agriculture was using more than 90% of the country’s water; now that there isn’t enough water, agriculture has collapsed, threatening food supplies. Iran relied on hydropower for much of its electric generation, but when there is no water behind the dams, the generators grind to a halt. In one area, desperate officials tried cloud seeding. They got rain—quite a lot of it—and flash flooding, too.

It was probably not a prudent decision to delegate responsibility for managing Iran’s water supply to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as the regime did when it came to power in 1979. That elite domestic armed force was more concerned with harassing or killing women who didn’t cover their hair properly. Much of the Middle East has built desalination plants to allow its water supply to meet the nation’s needs without depleting groundwater. Not Iran. You will recall what it was building instead. There has been some rain in December, but not enough to repair decades of bad policy.

I can give you only an outline of how mismanaging water has led to a national disaster. For more detail, I suggest the Middle East Forum’s November update of an earlier analysis: "The Thirst of a Nation."