Iran is looking to relocate the nation’s capital because of severe water shortages that make Tehran unsustainable. Experts say the crisis was caused by years of ill-conceived dam projects and overpumping that destroyed a centuries-old system for tapping underground reserves.
More than international sanctions, more than its stifling theocracy, more than recent bombardment by Israel and the U.S. — Iran’s greatest current existential crisis is what hydrologists are calling its rapidly approaching “water bankruptcy.” It is a crisis that has a sad origin, they say: the destruction and abandonment of tens of thousands of ancient tunnels for sustainably tapping underground water, known as qanats, that were once the envy of the arid world. But calls for the Iranian government to restore qanats and recharge the underground water reserves that once sustained them are falling on deaf ears. After a fifth year of extreme drought, Iran’s long-running water crisis reached unprecedented levels in November. The country’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, warned that Iran had “no choice” but to move its capital away from arid Tehran, which now has a population of about 10 million, to wetter coastal regions — a project that would take decades and has a price estimated by analysts at potentially $100 billion. While failed rains may be the immediate cause of the crisis, hydrologists say, the root cause is more than half a century of often foolhardy modern water engineering — extending back to before the country’s Islamic revolution of 1979, but accelerated by the Ayatollahs’ policies since.
A long-discussed plan to move the capital from Tehran to the wetter south is now “no longer optional” but a necessity.
“The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a former deputy head of the country’s environment department and now director of the United Nations University’s Institute of Water, Environment and Health.
To meet growing water shortages in the country’s burgeoning cities, “Iran was one of the top three dam-builders in the world” in the late 20th century, says Penelope Mitchell, a geographer at the University of Arizona’s Global Water Security Center. Dozens were built on rivers too small to sustain them. Rather than fixing shortages, the reservoirs have increased the loss of water due to evaporation from their large surface areas, she says, while lowering river flows downstream and drying up wetlands and underground water reserves. Today, many of the reservoirs behind those dams are all but empty. Iran’s president made his call to relocate the capital after water levels in Tehran’s five reservoirs plunged to 12 percent of capacity last month.
Women perform a prayer for rainfall at the Saleh Shrine in Tehran in November. AFP via Getty Images
Iran’s neighbors are exacerbating the crisis. In Afghanistan, the source of two rivers important to Iran’s water supplies (the Helmand and Harirud), the Taliban are on their own dam-building spree that is reducing cross-border flows. The Pashdan Dam, which went into operation in August, “means Afghanistan can control up to 80 percent of the average stream flow of the Harirud,” says Mitchell, threatening water supplies to much of eastern Iran, including Iran’s second largest city, Mashhad. While surface waters suffer, the situation underground is even worse. In the past 40 years, Iranians have sunk more than a million wells fitted with powerful pumps. The aim has been to irrigate arid farmland to meet the country’s goal of food self-sufficiency in a hostile world of trade sanctions. But the result has been rampant overpumping of aquifers that once held copious amounts of water. The majority of Iran’s precious underground water reserves have been pumped dry, says Madani. He estimates a loss of more than 210 cubic kilometers [50 cubic miles] of stored water in the first two decades of this century. Iran is far from alone in overpumping its precious national water stores. But a recent international study of 1,700 underground water reserves in 40 countries found that a staggering 32 of the world’s 50 most overpumped aquifers are in Iran. “The biggest alarm bells are in Iran’s West Qazvin Plain, Arsanjan Basin, Baladeh Basin, and Rashtkhar aquifers,” says coauthor Richard Taylor, geographer at University College London. In each, water tables are falling by up to 10 feet a year.
The dried-out Jajrood River, which Tehran depends on for water, in May. Bahram / Middle East Images via AFP via Getty Images
Agriculture is the prime culprit, says Mitchell. In Iran, some 90 percent of the water abstracted from rivers and underground aquifers is taken for agriculture. But as ever more pumped wells are sunk, their returns are diminishing. Analyzing the most recently publicly available figures, Roohollah Noori, a freshwater ecologist until recently at the University of Tehran, found that the number of wells and other abstraction points had almost doubled since 2000. But the amount of water successfully brought to the surface fell by 18 percent. In many places, formerly irrigated fields lie barren and abandoned. As reservoirs empty and wells fail, the country’s hydrologists say Iran is on the verge of “water bankruptcy.” They forecast food shortages, a repetition of water protests that spread across the country in the summer of 2021, and even a water war with Afghanistan over its dam-building. And a long-discussed plan to move the capital from Tehran to the wetter south of the country is now “no longer optional” but a necessity, because of water shortages, says Iran’s president. No detailed plans have yet been drawn up, but the Makran region on the shores of the Gulf of Oman is seen as the most likely location for the project.
Hydrologists say about half of Iran’s qanat systems have been rendered waterless by poor maintenance or overpumping.
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