Iran’s Biggest Crisis Is Water Shortage

Iran’s environmental collapse is no longer a slowly aggravated problem that leaders have ignored for decades. Here, he is accelerating, and threatening the country’s survival. The brutal drought for this summer, over decades of mismanagement and the obsession with the regime with regional conflict, has a blatant fact: Iran is almost outside the water – and close to time.

Iran has always been a dry country, as it got a third of the rain that most places are making on average. But in the past few years, things have moved from bad to worse, and the country is now in its fifth consecutive year of drought. One day a slow crisis has now become fast.

From 2003 to 2012, when the population of Iran was still less than 90 million, the rains were higher than it was today, the country lost nearly 211 billion cubic meters of water. This is nearly twice its renewable supply, and the amount of water that is renovated naturally, at today’s levels.

Most of this was pumped to cultivation, and is often through ineffective cultivation. In dry and hot years, renewed supply decreases sharply due to drying the soil faster, increasing evaporation, and reducing the recharge of the groundwater layer. Meanwhile, consumption rates often remain unchanged, causing the deficit to grow significantly. With the weakest rains in the past few years, the annual losses have slowed, but pressure on the groundwater is still intense with high temperature and dryness.

While the main headlines often focus on Iranian nuclear aspirations or the wars of the agent, the real existential threat lies below the surface – literally. The system, which once displayed the ingenuity of engineering with dams and water transport projects, now heads a broken hydrological system. Rivers dried up. The lakes disappeared. The groundwater layers collapse.

Iranian President Masoud Bezishian also admitted in July: “The water crisis is more dangerous than it is discussed today.” He added that “Tehran is running out of water, and if this continues, we will not be able to provide the city.”

Some residents were seen carrying jugs to the homes of relatives to bring water, while the demand for the pumps of living families and storage tanks increased, pushing prices to the top sharply. Others traveled to the northern provinces to escape the shortage. At the present time, Tehrani responds in practice – with equal parts of fear and frustration – but there have been no protests in the streets in the capital so far.

Throughout the country, citizens face an inorganical heat and increasing fears of prolonged water. Outside Tehran, in cities such as Nasimshahr, Sabzevar and Khomam, the protests recently erupted in the streets. In the past ten years, the water protests have occurred from Khuzestan to Salaqan. Farmers, workers and families have moved to the streets, and they asked why their trips and wells are empty. With the stumbling of public supplies, some families turned into special water tankers just to get them.

The system responded to the protests? Tear and lead gas.

Despite years of dehydration, the government has only provided a set of short -term repairs, such as digging deeper wells. In July, Pezeshkian himself admitted, “The crisis cannot be resolved through fragmented projects,” and it calls for special solutions to the region rooted in engineering, enforcement and education. But these solutions remain on paper while the tanks continue to decrease in their lowest historical levels.

Although the government announced on July 21 that Wednesday’s days will be dealt with as a public holiday in Tehran and the surrounding area to reduce the use of water and energy, Pezeshkian has retracted the decision at the end of July, and called for this step to just cosmetics-“coverage”, and instead, it was required from 12 hours on the prices of families with aquaculture. He emphasized the need to take consistent and long -term measures based on five main columns: integrated soil engineering in the soil, effective education, incentive -based policies, strict legal enforcement, and continuous evaluation and control.

Iranian groundwater reserves, which were once a lifeline for farmers and cities, were recklessly exhausted. In many areas, wells now reach dust only. The Earth is drowned. Crops failed. The entire villages have been abandoned. This is not just a natural dryness.

For thousands of years, the Iranians are balanced: never derived from the groundwater layer more than nature can be good at. This wisdom, which was once central to survival, was buried within decades of thinking in the short term and political neglect. What we are witnessing now is the direct result of these options. A system based on exploitation literally runs itself in the ground.

With the drain of groundwater comes the landing of the Earth. The distances between the soil molecules, which were full of water, are now filled with air – and the air cannot carry the weight of the layers above. As a result, the pressure turns into a collapse. For this reason, many cities in Iran were drowned today.

Although corruption lies in the heart of the water crisis in Iran, the problem exceeds the dam contracts and deals from within. It is also related to how water is used and wasted every day. If the Cape Town citizens, South Africa, can reduce their use of daily water to only 50 liters (about 13 gallons) per person to avoid zero-point where the taps will take place in the city dry and the residents need a queue to get stakes of water water-why are the residents of Tehran still consume more than 250 liters per day.

Cities like Tehran extended beyond what local water sources could support. Excessive consumption, leaked infrastructure, and unplanned urban growth pushed the regime to the brink of the abyss.

At the same time, agriculture is the largest water consumer, stuck using old and ineffective methods. Flood irrigation, and the cultivation of intense crops of water such as beets sugar and rice in arid areas, and the political owners associated with politics have drained the groundwater layers for profit instead of food security. What is more than the clay is more than 35 percent of agricultural products go to waste due to weak distribution systems and not planning. Instead of updating agriculture or demand management, the state continues to consider the other direction.

While the Iranians have long been experts to recharge the groundwater layers and maintain a balance in the water march, the government continues to pour money into huge inchs with millions of dollars that do the opposite. These projects, dams, transfers, and transfers end to the killing of rivers, depletion lakes, drying of wetlands, and cutting the natural relationship between surface water and water layers. Without this reaction, groundwater layers die as well. Life was once dismantled in the name of progress.

At the heart of this crisis, what many Iranians call the bitterness of the “water mafia”, a network of those familiar with the system, companies associated with the Revolutionary Guards, and opportunistic bureaucrats who turned water into a racket. They have pushed through damage and huge water projects, not because they are logical, but because they collected the pockets. These plans were destroyed by ecosystems, depleted rivers, and millions of left without clean water.

The system does not see water as a human right; He sees it as a controlled tool. Environmental justice does not mean anything when the goal is profit and power. In light of the rule of Supreme Leader Ali Khameneini, Iran rejected the United Nations agenda for 2030 for sustainable development, as its back turned over global obligations even when the country’s snow disappears, the lifeline in its rivers.

Some of these alleged development projects were not misleading-they were fronts to earn money. Khatham Anabia, the widespread construction arm in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, supervised the countless water and water transport plans alongside companies linked to the regime employees.

But behind concrete and channels was more evil. According to experts familiar with the classified files – including the 2006 report from the ISFAHAN Ruler’s Office – at least 6.5 million cubic meters have been transferred to the “nuclear center”. Details are minimal, because Iranian nuclear projects are wrapped in secrecy, but nuclear systems are known to require huge amounts of water for cooling purposes. This water may have helped revive the Gavkhouni wetlands, which are now engraved from dust.

The war with Israel in June only poured fuel on fire. While continuing not to dispose of the deep water crisis in Iran, the Iranian regime spent billions of dollars on missiles and repression. Now, farmers are forced to abandon their lands, and asks Wales dry: Why is the warfare war and violence when this money could have come to revive the groundwater layers under our feet?

Environmental policy has been marginalized. The Ministry of Energy is paralyzed. Iranian leaders play the geopolitical chess game while the country is literally drying under it.

But this crisis will not depend on Iran’s borders. With the increasing agricultural lands in the country and the water becomes scarce, migration will increase. Conflicts are opposed to common rivers, such as Helmand with Afghanistan and Tigris tributaries with Iraq, heating. The scarcity of water is now an operator for instability, and climate change inflates every danger.

Even if the Islamic Republic falls, the next government will inherit a devastating scene. Its repair will not be easy, and it will take more than new pipelines or desalination plants.

Iran needs full restart: Independent National Water Authority, open access to data, society -led management, and firm commitment to environmental justice. Some powerful traditional water management systems – especially overseeing the groundwater layer and recharged groundwater – should also be restored and updated to restore balance. Without these changes, any cosmetic repair will be, and the national collapse will continue.

This is a message to the world as much as Iran. Water is necessary for international security and peace. But if we deal with it as a later idea, we will pay all the price. The collapse of Iran’s waters is a warning to the entire world.