‘We may have to evacuate Tehran’: The catastrophe threatening Iran
Months after surviving a punishing war, the nation is now facing a drought which could be more devastating than any Israeli or American bomb
“May God protect this country from the enemy, from drought, from lies.”
Thus prayed Darius the Great, the ancient Persian emperor, in an appeal to the heavens inscribed on the tomb in Persepolis where he was laid to rest more than 2,500 years ago.
The Islamic theocrats who run Iran today may not think much of Darius’s Zoroastrian god, but they have every reason to hope his prayer was heard. For, just months after surviving a punishing war with their own enemies, they are now facing a drought – made worse by their own lies – which could be more devastating than any Israeli or American bomb.
It is not clear that their own empire will survive.
At the time of writing, Tehran’s reservoirs are estimated to hold just nine more days of drinking water. If it does not rain soon, president Masoud Pezeshkian has warned, the capital city – home to 10 million people – may have to be evacuated.
The crisis is national and extraordinary. In the northeastern city of Mashhad, the second largest in Iran, reservoirs are down to less than three per cent of capacity. In all, the energy ministry said on Tuesday, 19 of the country’s major dams are on the brink of running dry.
Archaeologists have even warned that the aquifer beneath Persepolis itself has been so thoroughly drained that the ancient city – Darius’s tomb and all – could soon collapse into the ground.
The situation is now “beyond” a crisis, says Kaveh Madani, a former deputy head of Iran’s environment department. Both the “checking account” of rain-filled mountain reservoirs, and the “savings account” of groundwater, which has traditionally got the country through dry years, are exhausted.
Sanctions, street protests, and Israeli bombs: nothing seems to shake the Islamic Republic’s grip on power in Iran. But could nature bring it down?
The “serious and unimaginable crisis” facing Iran can only partly be blamed on rainfall dropping off 40 per cent year-on-year, Pezeshkian said in a press conference in August.
Thoughtless development has drained the aquifers, and Tehran has been allowed to grow so fast and so chaotically that its landscape simply cannot support the modern population, he argued. The capital’s institutions, he said, will have to move to another part of the country – probably the south. The vast civilian population possibly evacuated.
And worst of all, he complains, there is almost nothing that can be done about it. “Some people are going on TV and saying [the government has] the ability to do something,” a visibly angry Pezeshkian shouted in an address to Parliament on Tuesday. “If you really think you have the ability to fix it, I’ll hand over all the authority – come and fix it.”
He has been accused by some of scaremongering. Others point out that evacuating a city of 10 million people is probably impossible. But, say Iranian scientists, he is not wrong on either the scale nor the causes of the challenge.
“Now, we are in the sixth year of drought. Although I hoped that the sixth year would not be as dry as in the previous five years, a drought this long can paralyse any government anywhere in the world,” says Madani. “It’s a serious threat. During this time, Iran has had two governments with different policies. They decided to [store] water or release water.
“All those decisions are legacy decisions that, now, the administration of Pezeshkian needs to deal with. That’s why there is so much frustration. And unfortunately, at this point in time, there is no solution left except for emergency response and begging the citizens to consume less water or even leave the town to reduce their consumption.”
Rationing has already begun. Some universities have already shut off the showers in dormitories. Water authorities are talking about reducing water pressure to zero overnight. And almost inevitably, it is the poorer neighbourhoods who seem to be bearing the brunt of privations.
“Some nights the pressure is too low and water just drips from the taps. We are worried about it and don’t have any idea what to do if Tehran runs out of water,” says Siamak, a resident of Shush, a poor inner-city district. “We are not wasting the water, no one in our alley does. They should fix those leaks in the distribution system which would [solve] the problem – they themselves waste water.” His family have already bought buckets to store water if the taps dry up completely.
Residents in Tajrish and Niavaran – well-to-do districts in the north of Tehran – say the drop in pressure in the taps is so far barely noticeable. One local resident compares the shortage to years of reports about the drying up of Lake Urmia in Iran’s north-east; a distant problem seen only on the news.
Part of the problem is just the arrival of long-heralded climate change. Historically, Tehran has experienced no more than two consecutive years of drought per dry period, Mohsen Ardakani, the CEO of Tehran Province Water and Wastewater Company, told state TV on Saturday. This is its first five-year drought - so it is no wonder the capital’s dams are at “historic minimum”.
Yet this catastrophe should not have taken anyone by surprise.
Since 2007, the Zayandeh Rud river, which used to run through the city of Isfahan year round, has become a seasonal stream. Wetlands in Baluchestan in the south-east have already dried. In 2021, water shortages produced protests in Khuzestan, a southwestern province on the Iraqi border.
Since the turn of the millennium, multiple Iranian scientists have sounded the alarm about the coming era of climate change-induced droughts and Iran’s ever increasing water usage.
Madani himself wrote his first paper studying water management disasters in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and calling on Iran not to fall into the same traps, in the early 2000s. When he rose to become one of Iran’s top environmental officials in 2017 he warned that the country was “water bankrupt” and needed to act to reduce consumption.
It was not a welcome message. He was accused of being an MI6 (or Mossad) infiltrator sent to convince the government to shut down the agricultural sector, thus provoking an economic crisis in the countryside that would create conditions for the Islamic State (IS) terror group to exploit. He was forced out of politics and eventually had to flee the country.
“The Israeli-Iran war tells us that the Iranian intelligence is well infiltrated [by the Israelis]. So I don’t know if those stories were built by those who love Iran or Iran’s enemies,” he says with a wry grimace. “But that was what they were claiming: that water bankruptcy was a myth. Iran had water. They could manage it. They had enough reservoirs.”
It sounds mad. But it was a very Islamic-Republic-of-Iran response to a very common dilemma.
The fact is, no government anywhere really wants to kick the hornet’s nest of water reform, even when scientists like Madani argue it is as critical as chemotherapy for a cancer patient. Water is seldom thought about by political economists, but it supports agriculture, food production, health, air quality, energy production – and, of course, jobs and quality of life. For Iran, reducing consumption would mean, above all, agricultural reform: growing only priority crops with fewer farmers, on less land, with less water.
Difficult enough in the best of times, under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s “resistance economy” (a model of self-sufficiency intended to withstand international sanctions), it is all but impossible.
And perhaps Iran’s intelligence services are not wrong to suspect their enemies have noticed this vulnerability. This summer, Benjamin Netanyahu at least twice used water for propaganda, promising Iranians Israeli water-recycling technology “the moment your country is free” – a clear nod to regime change.
And during the 12-day war in June, an Israeli airstrike in the northern Tehran district of Tajrish breached a major water pipe, resulting in flooding and a suspension of water supplies to homes and businesses there. It is not clear if the pipe damage was a deliberate or “collateral” effect of the strike. Either way, says Madani, it was a breach of international law.
Ignoring the problem is obviously no longer an option. Nor is lying to the public, which explains why Pezeshkian’s government is making no effort to brush over the crisis. He must be hoping the public will appreciate his frankness. “There’s no water left behind dams, and our wells are running dry. Instead of blaming each other, you and I should think about it – I neither send rain nor own the well. It’s everyone’s well and the rain that God sends we should use properly – that is it,” he implored MPs on Tuesday.
But it might be too late. On Sunday night, students at Al-Zahra University in Tehran held a protest after the university imposed restrictions on water use. Questions are also being asked on television, in parliament, and in the newspapers.
“The government, instead of providing structural solutions, has effectively shifted crisis management onto the shoulders of the people,” the Tehran daily Jahan-e-Sanat wrote in an editorial on Tuesday. “The issue is mismanagement of resources – management that closed its eyes to science for years and didn’t listen to warnings. Today, the result of those policies is before us: a city that must pray for rain to continue living.”
Madani is wary of drawing geopolitical conclusions – wary of attributing, as some have, the creation of IS or the Syrian civil war specifically to drought. “The collapse of political regimes is not like that,” he says. Not so simple.
But that does not mean that, rain or shine, the heavens will not now play a huge part in dictating the fate of the Iranian regime. “What nature is doing to Iran right now is something that President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu could not have wished for,” he says. “What is happening is much worse than those bombs that were dropped on Iran.”
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