Tehran is running out of water.
Rationing has started in Iran's capital, where some of the roughly 10 million residents are experiencing “night pressure drops“between midnight and 5 am. The entire country is in an unprecedented drought, face to face This is the driest and hottest autumn in almost 60 years. Tehran has received There has been no rain at all since the beginning of September, and no precipitation is expected in the foreseeable future.
City depends on on five large reservoirs for water supply. One is completely dry and the other is below 8 percent power. Last week, the managing director of the Tehran Regional Water Resources Authority told state media that the Karaj Dam had only two weeks of potable water left. The drought also spread beyond the city. Mashhad, the country's second largest city, has run out of water supplies. fallen capacity below 3 percent, putting 4 million people at imminent risk.
But if nothing changes, Tehran could soon face Day zero — or when a municipality can no longer supply drinking water to its residents and the taps run dry. In October, President Masoud Pezeshkian stated that Tehran can no longer serve as the country's capital, citing the water crisis as a major factor.
“If it doesn’t rain in Tehran by the end of November, we will have to [formally] ration water”, Pezeshkian said Iranian state media on Thursday. “And if it still doesn’t rain, we’ll have to evacuate Tehran.”
While it is unlikely that evacuations will happen any time soon, Tehran's water crisis is not equal. When the taps run dry, Tehran will become richer purchase mineral water or rely on water tanks, which is a prohibitively expensive option for many. The rest must rely on charity, otherwise they will die of thirst.
How did things get so bad?
Water use in Tehran is quite higheven for cities. But Iran's water problems go deeper than this record drought.
The country is uniquely isolated and subject to numerous sanctions, crippling the economy and making it difficult for Iran to obtain the latest water technology. This is an enemy state for many of its neighboursas well as regional leaders in the field of desalination technologies – Israel, Saudi ArabiaAnd United Arab Emirates. But desalination largely irrelevant in the Iranian context, often coming to high environmental costs.
According to water analyst Nick Couser, the Iranians are under the thumb of “water mafia“Iran faces water bankruptcy; demand far exceeds supply,” Kovsar wrote in Time. “The collapse of water security in Iran has been decades in the making and is rooted in a mania for megaprojects—building dams, deep wells, and water transfer schemes—that ignored basic hydrology and ecological balance.”
Iran also especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change: more than 82 percent of the country is arid or semi-arid, and Iran ranks sixth on the list of countries most prone to natural disasters. The country grows thirsty crops and its quest for food security and self-sufficiency is a huge achievement. driver its water bankruptcy. Agricultural sector includes up to 90 percent of the country's total water intake.
However, the environmental crisis in Iran is exacerbating existing geopolitical tensions both within and outside the country. Water is sometimes shipped from one region of the country to another, raising concerns that some ethnic groups are being deliberately deprived of water at the expense of others.
Yale University historian and Iran expert Arash Azizwho is also a writer for The Atlantic magazine, told me that despite the enormous humanitarian costs of ongoing sanctions, it is unlikely that they will be lifted in response to the water crisis.
The future of city living
Tehran joins many, many other cities that have moved closer to Day Zero, and it certainly won't be the last. Sao Paulo in Brazil and Cape Town in South Africa experienced similar crises. ended with precipitation. However, Tehran may not have been so lucky with the weather forecast.
So, let's return to the idea of evacuating Tehran.
Of course, this is incredibly unpopular. The Iranians rejected the idea when the president mentioned the possibility. Former Tehran Mayor Gholamhossein Karbashi said it was “a joke… The evacuation of Tehran makes no sense.”
Azizi believes it is unlikely that Iran will move its capital any time soon. Most of the jobs are located in Tehran. And evacuating a city of more than 10 million people would be an incredible logistical challenge.
More importantly, resettlement will not solve the immediate problem of access to water. But the current strategy of delivering supplies, rationing water and praying for rain is completely inadequate for the current moment. And water rationing is a temporary measure.
“In effect, cutting off water supplies to households or neighborhoods de facto reduces their consumption,” said David Michel, senior fellow on water security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But the underlying demand is still there.”
However, there are other strategies that cities like Tehran could use. Michel argued that cities should prioritize business models that provide the resources and revenue needed to operate, maintain and expand water systems to serve new customers.
“This problem has left many municipal water systems around the world in a very difficult situation, with revenues for many municipal water systems not covering the costs of operation and maintenance, let alone expanding supplies,” Michel said. Economic incentives such as volumetric tariffswhere the cost of water is proportional to the quantity consumed may be beneficial. The more you use, the higher the price you pay, essentially in the hope of reducing the pressure on the poorest consumers.
Help can't come to Tehran soon enough. American cities in California and the southwestern United States, with similarly arid climates and dwindling water supplies, should take note. And everyone should pay attention when Iran's president says residents of his capital may have to evacuate in a few months.
“You can imagine the psychological effect,” Azizi said. And this could be “the future of the whole world.”
