Iran’s environmental collapse is no longer the slowly worsening problem that leaders ignored for decades. It’s here, it’s accelerating, and it’s threatening the very survival of the country. This summer’s brutal drought, layered over decades of mismanagement and the regime’s obsession with regional conflict, has laid bare a stark reality: Iran is nearly out of water—and almost out of time.
Iran has always been a dry country, getting just a third of the rain that most places do on average. But in the past few years, things have gone from bad to worse, and the country is now in its fifth straight year of drought. What was once a slow crisis is now spiraling fast.
From 2003-2019, when Iran’s population was still under 90 million and rainfall was higher than it is today, the country lost nearly 211 billion cubic meters of water. That’s almost twice its renewable supply, the amount of water that is naturally replenished, at today’s levels.
Most of that was pumped to grow food, often through inefficient farming. In dry, hot years, renewable supply drops sharply due to faster soil drying, increased evapotranspiration, and reduced aquifer recharge. Meanwhile, consumption rates often remain unchanged, causing the deficit to grow significantly. With weaker rains in the past few years, annual losses have slowed, but pressure on groundwater remains intense as heat rises and droughts worsen.
While headlines often focus on Iran’s nuclear ambitions or its proxy wars, the real existential threat lies beneath the surface—literally. The regime that once showcased its engineering prowess with dam-building and water transfer projects now presides over a broken hydrological system. Rivers have dried up. Lakes have disappeared. Aquifers are collapsing.
As Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian bluntly admitted in July: “The water crisis is more serious than what is being discussed today.” He added that “Tehran is running out of water, and if this continues, we won’t be able to supply the city.”
Some residents have been seen carrying jugs to relatives’ homes to fetch water, while demand for household pumps and storage tanks has surged, driving prices sharply higher. Others have traveled to the northern provinces to escape shortages. For now, Tehranis are responding pragmatically—with equal parts fear and frustration—but there have been no street protests in the capital yet.
Across the country, citizens are facing unbearable heat and growing fears of prolonged water shortages. Outside of Tehran, in towns such as Nasimshahr, Sabzevar, and Khomam, protests have recently erupted in the streets. In the past 10 years, water protests have occurred from Khuzestan to Isfahan. Farmers, workers, and families have taken to the streets, asking why their rivers are gone and their wells are empty. With public supplies faltering, some households have turned to private water tankers just to get by.
The regime’s response to protests? Tear gas and bullets.
Despite years of drought, the government has offered only a patchwork of short-term fixes, such as digging deeper wells. In July, Pezeshkian himself acknowledged, “The crisis cannot be solved through fragmented projects,” calling for region-specific solutions rooted in engineering, enforcement, and education. But those solutions remain on paper while reservoirs continue to fall to historic lows.
Although the government had announced on July 21 that Wednesdays would be treated as a public holiday in Tehran and the surrounding region to reduce water and energy use, Pezeshkian pushed back on the decision at the end of July, calling the move merely cosmetic—a “cover-up,” not a real solution—and instead ordered 12-hour cuts for households with especially high water use rates. He emphasized the need for consistent, long-term action grounded in five key pillars: integrated water-soil-crop engineering, effective education, incentive-based polices, strict legal enforcement, and ongoing evaluation and oversight.
Iran’s groundwater reserves, once a lifeline for farmers and cities, have been recklessly depleted. In many regions, wells now reach only dust. The land is sinking. Crops are failing. Entire villages have been abandoned. This isn’t just a natural drought.
For thousands of years, Iranians understood the balance: Never draw more from an aquifer than nature could replenish. That wisdom, once central to survival, has been buried under decades of short-term thinking and political negligence. What we’re witnessing now is the direct result of those choices. A system built on exploitation has quite literally run itself into the ground.
With groundwater depletion comes land subsidence. The spaces between soil particles, once filled with water, are now filled with air—and air can’t bear the weight of the layers above. As a result, compaction turns into collapse. That’s why so many cities in Iran today are sinking.
Although corruption lies at the heart of Iran’s water crisis, the problem goes far beyond dam contracts and insider deals. It’s also about how water is used, and wasted, every day. If the citizens of Cape Town, South Africa, managed to cut their daily water use to just 50 liters (about 13 gallons) per person to avoid Day Zero—the point at which a city’s taps would run dry and residents would need to queue for water rations—then why are residents of Tehran still consuming more than 250 liters per day—especially when water-intensive air conditioners dump tens of liters daily during the hottest months?
Cities such as Tehran have sprawled far beyond what local water sources can support. Overconsumption, leaky infrastructure, and unplanned urban growth have pushed the system to the brink.
Meanwhile, agriculture, the biggest water consumer, is stuck using outdated, inefficient methods. Flood irrigation, the cultivation of water-intensive crops such as sugar beet and rice in arid regions, and politically connected landowners have drained aquifers for profit rather than food security. To make matters worse, some research indicates that roughly 35 percent of agricultural products go to waste as a result of poor storage, weak distribution systems, and lack of planning. Instead of modernizing farming or managing demand, the state continues to look the other way.
While Iranians have long been experts at recharging aquifers and maintaining balance in the water table, the government continues to pour money into multimillion-dollar megaprojects that do the opposite. These projects, dams, diversions, and transfers end up killing rivers, draining lakes, drying out wetlands, and severing the natural connection between surface water and aquifers. Without that interaction, the aquifers die, too. What once sustained life is now being dismantled in the name of progress.
At the heart of this crisis is what many Iranians bitterly call the “Water Mafia,” a web of regime insiders, Revolutionary Guard-linked firms, and opportunistic bureaucrats who have turned water into a racket. They’ve pushed through massive dam and water transfer projects not because they made sense, but because they padded pockets. These schemes have wrecked ecosystems, drained rivers, and left millions without clean water.
The regime doesn’t see water as a human right; it sees it as a tool for control. Environmental justice means nothing when the goal is profit and power. Under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s rule, Iran dismissed the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development outright, turning its back on global commitments even as the country’s snowpack, the lifeblood of its rivers, vanished.
Some of these so-called development projects weren’t just misguided—they were fronts to make money. Khatam al-Anbiya, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ vast construction arm, has overseen countless dam and water transfer schemes alongside firms tied to regime insiders.
But behind the concrete and canals was something far more sinister. According to experts familiar with classified files—including a 2006 report from the office of the governor of Isfahan—at least 6.5 million cubic meters of water were diverted to a secret “nuclear center.” Details are scant, since Iran’s nuclear projects are wrapped in secrecy, but nuclear systems are known to require enormous amounts of water for cooling purposes. That water might have helped revive the Gavkhouni wetland, now a cracked, lifeless expanse of dust.
The war with Israel in June only poured fuel on the fire. While continuing to not act on Iran’s deepening water crisis, Iran’s regime spent billions of dollars on missiles and repression. Now, farmers forced to abandon their land as wells run dry are asking: Why bankroll war and violence when that money could have revived the aquifers beneath our feet?
Environmental policy has been sidelined. The Ministry of Energy is paralyzed. Iran’s leaders are playing geopolitical chess while the country is literally drying up beneath them.
But this crisis won’t stop at Iran’s borders. As the country’s farmland withers and water becomes scarcer, migration will increase. Conflicts over shared rivers, such as the Helmand with Afghanistan and tributaries of the Tigris with Iraq, are heating up. Water scarcity is now a trigger for instability, and climate change is amplifying every risk.
Even if the Islamic Republic falls, the next government will inherit a devastated landscape. Fixing it won’t be easy, and it will take far more than new pipelines or desalination plants.
Iran needs a full reboot: an independent national water authority, open access to data, community-led management, and a firm commitment to environmental justice. It must also reclaim and modernize some of its powerful traditional water management systems—especially aquifer stewardship and groundwater recharge—to restore balance. Without these changes, any reform will be cosmetic, and the national collapse will continue.
This is a message for the world as much as it is for Iran. Water is essential for international security and peace. But if we treat it as an afterthought, then we’ll all pay the price. Iran’s water collapse is a warning for the entire world.
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