Tehran’s Corruption Has Put the City on the Brink of Catastrophe

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian recently warned that Tehran may soon face evacuation – or even transfer – due to water shortages. His statements sparked a state of panic, but this is not the first time that officials have announced the transfer of the capital.

The idea has resurfaced regularly, usually after fears of earthquakes — after the Manjil Rudbar earthquake in 1990, and then after Bam in 2003, when the scale of death and destruction prompted senior officials to talk about moving the capital from earthquake-prone Tehran. Now the water crisis has made the threat seem immediate. And it’s not just water and fault lines: Tehran’s toxic smog, now a near-constant emergency that repeatedly shuts down the city, could lead to a slow exodus. But whatever the reason, evacuating Tehran or moving the capital to another region – such as Makran on the Gulf of Oman – is a fantasy, not a solution.

Instead of pursuing major transfers, officials should confront the real problem: decades of bad governance and reckless water management that created this crisis in the first place.

Water scarcity and the collapse of the supply network have pushed Tehran to the brink of abyss. Land subsidence has weakened the city’s structures, making it fragile. A major earthquake would be catastrophic, destroying infrastructure, causing significant human casualties, and possibly paralyzing the country’s administrative center at a time when Iran is facing multiple crises.

The other day, Gary Sick, a veteran Iran analyst who served on the US National Security Council under several presidents, warned that a major earthquake and drought hitting Tehran would amount to a coup for the Islamic Republic, unleashing instability and chaos.

The ruling theocracy in Iran is a major part of the problem. For decades, water policy has been hijacked by the Revolutionary Guards and a “water mafia” of contractors associated with them, who have profited from indulging in building dams and transporting groundwater between basins while marginalizing science and overstepping environmental boundaries.

Tehran’s mayors have prioritized development over logic—an approach embodied by former Mayor Gholamhossein Karbashi (1990-1998), who dramatically expanded a capital that simply did not have the water, aquifers, breathable air, stable ground, or seismic safety to achieve endless growth.

Fixing this mess means breaking those networks and imposing real transparency and legal limits, steps that the regime is structurally unable to take, given its entrenched financial interests and distorted security-driven decision-making.

The idea of ​​moving the capital had surfaced from time to time even before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but it never transcended scattered talk into a real political debate. After the revolution, fires flared up whenever an earthquake rocked Iran – or even after rumors of an earthquake. In the 1980s, Iranian-Armenian structural geologist Manuel Berberian was one of the first to prove that the seismic threat to Tehran was quite real.

The findings of Berberian’s pioneering work for the Iranian Geological Survey on Tehran’s fault system and its historical seismic activity were stark: large parts of the city should never have been developed, and millions of Tehran’s residents were at risk. Berberian’s research received initial praise, but government officials ignored his warnings as Tehran continued to spread across multiple active fault lines.

Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani became president in 1989, beginning a period of “reconstruction” after the devastating Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). Under Rafsanjani, ostensibly more technocratic bureaucrats came to the fore. Among them was Karpaci, a young cleric in plain clothes and a self-proclaimed “modern” administrator.

In a 2001 interview with author Nick Kosar, Karpaci said he rejected the idea of ​​abandoning the capital because it reminded him of Brazil moving its capital from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia, which he described as a costly mistake. But instead of tackling much-needed reforms, Karbashi redoubled his problem-solving efforts, trying to revitalize Tehran through large-scale construction projects. Berberian and other experts briefed Rafsanjani on the risks, but Tehran’s expansion continued under Rafsanjani and Karbashi.

Berberian eventually left Iran for the United States in 1990 after concluding that the Islamic Republic and Iranian academic institutions did not want a non-Muslim expert advising them or teaching Muslim students. But his warnings went largely unheeded.

In the 1980s, Iran adopted a set of building regulations – including the National Standard Code on Earthquake Resistance – with the aim of making Tehran and other cities more earthquake-resistant. But corruption through density sales, which allowed developers to buy an additional floor-to-height ratio under Karpaci and the mayors who followed him, effectively circumvented these rules: old buildings were left unreinforced, and thousands of new buildings were constructed with little real capacity to withstand a major earthquake.

Instead of addressing the fundamental risks Tehran faces, Karbashi has adopted the regime’s default strategy of endless construction. The city swelled in size from 182 square miles in 1991 to 239 square miles in 2000, most of it under Karpaci’s supervision. The towers were built on unstable alluvial plains and above seismic fault rebound zones, areas where buildings must stay away from active faults; Water use rose; Officials continued to build dams, drill deep wells, and portage rivers, all the while claiming that Tehran’s water supply would never run out.

Karpaci later fell from grace and was briefly imprisoned, but the vertical model he built first and which he normalized outlived him. As the aquifers were exploited year after year, the ground beneath Tehran became compressed. Subsidence spread, pipes cracked, leaks multiplied, and buildings began to strain, sometimes in plain sight.

According to Iranian experts interviewed by the authors, Tehran would be in much less danger if appropriate laws were implemented and existing structures were properly modernized. Instead, permit revenues fueled high-rise buildings on unstable soil and within setback areas. Today, more than 12,000 building blocks in Tehran lie in the fault zones, including about 1,000 12-story high-rise buildings.

No wonder the idea of ​​moving the capital keeps popping up. But it also serves as a cash cow for a familiar circle of contractors, including the IRGC’s Khatam al-Anbiya construction headquarters, a major player in the water mafia.

Last year, then-Interior Minister Ahmed Wahidi estimated the cost of transportation at about $100 billion. This breaks down into a shopping list of smaller, billable “essentials”: feasibility studies, site selection, master plans, seismic and water surveys, new highways, rail lines, energy and water corridors, housing phasing, and endless consultations. Even without an actual plan of action, each subproject became a new pretext for massive contracts flowing to Khatam and his affiliates, draining the state budget and funneling money through the IRGC’s patronage and proxy networks. Because each “stage” can span years—even decades—the gravy train doesn’t need an end point to keep rolling.

Moving more than 14 million people from Tehran and its surrounding suburbs is practically unsuccessful. Current water shortages are already straining the country, and no other region has the housing, jobs, services or water capacity to accommodate so many new arrivals. In internal chatter among lower-level managers, even the best evacuation might only house about a million people temporarily, and even those would be concerned about their homes and belongings being ransacked while they’re gone, one source said.

But the solution is not to evacuate Tehran or find another capital. There are no other realistic options. For example, Makran, which the regime recently mentioned as a potential area for a new capital, is brutal, hot, dry, and backward. In addition, seismologists warn that the Makran coast lies in a subduction zone capable of generating a magnitude 8 earthquake and a devastating tsunami.

Saving Tehran from its current water shortage starts with reducing demand, which can be achieved by reducing consumption, expanding greywater reuse, and fixing leaky pipes. Moreover, the city needs serious aquifer recharge. To limit losses from earthquakes, Iranian leaders should stop construction on or near active faults and on soft soil that aggravates the earthquake; strengthening old and unsafe buildings as well as major systems such as hospitals, bridges and water lines; And create a real emergency plan – regular drills, clear evacuation routes, backup water and electricity – so the city can function after a major shock.

All this is possible on paper. The problem is that the current power structure actually makes doing so almost impossible.

On the one hand, the regime is under financial pressure resulting from largely self-imposed sanctions. Without a real shift in foreign policy and a clear retreat from its nuclear ambitions, Tehran will not receive Western funding or serious private investment.

This regime also has a long record of corruption. Its decisions are driven by short-term interests and imposed from the top down, with people’s well-being treated as an afterthought. Technical reforms will not succeed without political change. The system that caused the crisis cannot be trusted to solve it.