Taps run dry as Tehran evacuation looms
Part of the reason the Iranian government is so concerned is that a water crisis can build into a political grievance and fuel unrest.
Videos posted on social media and verified by NBC News showed students protesting water shortages at Tehran’s Al-Zahra University last weekend.
The issue has sometimes led to violence and arrests in the southwestern Khuzestan province, home to a large Arab minority that has long complained of neglect by the central government.
This time, many Iranians blame the state.
“The authorities have known about this problem for years, but nothing has been done,” Sadegh Razavi, a Tehran restaurant owner, said. “In a country as rich in resources as ours, it’s sad that we have no electricity in the summer and now a water crisis, too.”
The prolonged drought along with years of overconsumption, an inefficient agricultural sector and mismanagement — including decades building mega-dams of questionable utility — have led to the problem, analysts say.
“I don’t call it a crisis anymore. This is a state of failure. That’s why for years I’ve referred to it as water bankruptcy,” said Kaveh Madani, the director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health.
“A crisis is a state that you can mitigate, you can go back to normal at some point if you put forces together. But the damages we are seeing to the ecosystem, to the nature and even to many parts of the economy and infrastructure are irreversible.”
A ‘no-brainer’ crisis
The current situation was not a surprise to researchers based in North America who studied Iran’s water supply and the strains on it.
“It was a no-brainer,” said Ali Nazemi, an associate professor at Concordia University in Montreal.
In a 2021 study in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports, Nazemi and other researchers warned that the Islamic Republic was overdrafting groundwater in nearly four-fifths of the landscape, which was causing Iran’s land to sink, its soil to grow more salty and its salt lakes to disappear.
The researchers, who dedicated the paper “to the people of Iran,” warned that a crisis was brewing that had the potential for “irreversible impacts on land and environment, threatening country’s water, food, socio-economic security.”
The researchers used publicly available data from Iran’s Ministry of Energy to assess the groundwater depletion. “After this paper was published, they took the data sets out of public access,” Nazemi said.
