One reason the Iranian government is so concerned is that the water crisis could spill over into political discontent and spark unrest.
Video posted on social networks and verified by NBC News, they show students protesting water shortages at Tehran's Al-Zahra University over the weekend.
The problem has sometimes led to violence and arrests in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, 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 many years, but nothing has been done,” said Sadegh Razavi, a restaurant owner in Tehran. “In a resource-rich country like ours, it’s sad that we don’t have electricity in the summer and now we have a water crisis.”
Prolonged drought coupled with years of overconsumption, an inefficient agricultural sector and mismanagement – including decades of construction of megadams of dubious utility – led to the problem, analysts say.
“I don't call it a crisis anymore. It's a state of failure. That's why for years I called it a water bankruptcy,” said Kaveh Madani, director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health.
“A crisis is a condition that can be mitigated; at some point you can return to normal if you work together. But the damage we are seeing to the ecosystem, nature and even many parts of the economy and infrastructure is irreversible.”
“Carefree” crisis
The current situation did not come as a surprise to North American researchers studying Iran's water supply and pressure.
“It wasn’t difficult,” said Ali Nazemi, an assistant professor at Concordia University in Montreal.
IN A 2021 study in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports.Nazemi and other researchers have warned that the Islamic Republic has overused groundwater across nearly four-fifths of its landscape, causing Iran's land to subsidence, increasing soil salinity and disappearing salt lakes.
The researchers, who dedicated the article to “the people of Iran,” warned that a crisis was brewing that could have “irreversible impacts on the land and environment, threatening the country’s water, food and socio-economic security.”
The researchers used publicly available data from the Iranian Ministry of Energy to estimate groundwater depletion. “After this article was published, they removed the datasets from public access,” Nazemi said.
