Iran is a warning to every society that treats water as infinite. Over the summer, Iran’s water crisis turned into an emergency. Wells collapsed and some reservoirs ran dry. Taps went dry for half a day in Tehran, and state media warned that the city of about 10 million people could hit “Day Zero,” the point at which water resources can no longer meet demand, within weeks.
Temperatures rose above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, air conditioners droned, and power cuts followed. Millions of Iranians baked in the punishing heat. In a rare admission of failure, Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president offered 100 billion tomans (about a million dollars) to anyone who could solve the crisis.
Iran isn’t facing a mere drought. Iran faces water bankruptcy, with demand far outstripping supply. The collapse of water security in Iran has been decades in the making and is rooted in a mania for megaprojects—dam building, deep wells, and water transfer schemes—that ignored the fundamentals of hydrology and ecological balance.
For millennia, qanats—ingenious underground aqueducts—balanced survival with scarcity across the central plateau of Iran. Those traditional systems are now collapsing alongside aquifers, and ancient settlements in Yazd in central Iran, Kerman in southeast Iran, and Khorasan in northeastern Iran have been abandoned as qanats dried up, aquifers caved in, and land subsided. Satellite imagery and field surveys show entire farming communities disappearing because their groundwater sources failed.
Successive Iranian rulers believed that dams, deep wells, and inter-basin transfers could outsmart geography and climate. The mismanagement of resources by the Islamic Republic compounded the crisis. Political hubris and mismanagement have reduced one of the oldest water civilizations to a parable of collapse.
Origins of the water crisis
The environmental unraveling of Iran began with a fascination for concrete. In 1949, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran,…
