When Iran Runs Out of Water, You’ll Know Why

There is an interesting article in Quillette called “How long before the regime falls in Iran?”,  by Art Keller, which I highly recommend. It includes a lot of interesting discussion about the regime in Iran, how fragile it is and how it manufactures support, but the part I found most interesting relates to water. “Iran is running out, fast,” Keller says. “Nothing to do with climate change, and everything to do with the sort of epic state mismanagement reminiscent of China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’.”

Note the phrase “nothing to do with climate change”. It is worth archiving this story for the time when Iranian society implodes and the Guardian and New York Times mindlessly and automatically point the finger at fossil fuel use.

Nikahang Kowsar is a critic of the regime and a geologist before he became a political cartoonist. According to Keller, Kowsar was forced to leave Iran 20 years ago for his cartoons mocking the regime, but before that he warned the president of Iran, Mohammed Khatami, that Iran’s water management practices were going to eventually “push the regime off a cliff”. Kowsar believes his warning is about to become a reality, and that Iran is headed for a drought of biblical proportions:  

I believe that Iran is going to face a dire situation in the next few years and it’s not going to be sustainable. Based on the numbers that the government just published last year, by 2013, when Rohani became the president, we had 12 million people living in city margins. In 2018, the number rose to 19.5 million. That means seven-and-a-half million in just five years.

Rural people are being forced to move to the cities because they’re running out of water and can’t work their land. Iran has an annual water deficit of 20 billion cubic metres and is making up the shortfall by drawing down the aquifers. As a result, according to Kowsar, "Iran has lost more than 85 percent of its groundwater resources [in] the last 40 years. The population has gone from 35 million to 84 million. So, you have more consumers, less water and that means less food, less opportunity. So, nothing is sustainable."

Kowsar points out that when the Shah fell, the regime not only rejected the Shah’s sustainable water management programmes but also started building inefficient infrastructure. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has a commercial arm and owns, among other things, the giant construction company, Khatam-al Anbiya, which makes a lot of money from building dams. But, as Keller notes, dams are bad water management in a hot, dry environment where keeping water above ground leads to massive losses from evaporation, instead of letting it stay underground in the cool aquifers. Dams also prevent rivers from recharging the very aquifers Iran is drawing down.
It would be a brave analyst to predict the political and social consequences of Iran running out of water. What we can say, without fear of contradiction, is that they will be bad.

David Wolcott