Iran Was Facing “Water Bankruptcy” Before The Bombs Began Falling

---

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.

---

A recent article in Yale Environment 360 begins with this statement: “More than international sanctions, more than its stifling theocracy, more than recent bombardment by Israel and the US — Iran’s greatest current existential crisis is what hydrologists are calling its rapidly approaching ‘water bankruptcy’.”

Until fairly recently, Iran relied on qanats — tunnels that transported fresh water from aquifers to communities, sometimes over long distances. They first appeared in Persia 3,000 years ago and are still in use today in many parts of the Middle  East and northern Africa. According to Wikipedia, “a qanat enables water to be transported over long distances by largely eliminating the risk of much of it evaporating on the journey.”

Iran has an estimated 70,000 qanats, most of which are more than 2,500 years old. There total combined length is estimated to be more than 250,000 miles. Some of the tunnels are 3 feet high, a thousand feet underground, and supplied by more than 400 vertical wells for maintenance.

Wikipedia adds,

“The system also has the advantage of being fairly resistant to natural disasters, such as floods and earthquakes, as well as to man-made disasters, such as wartime destruction and water supply terrorism. Furthermore, it is almost insensitive to varying levels of precipitation, delivering a flow with only gradual variations from wet to dry years.

“The typical design of a qanat is a gently sloping tunnel accessed by a series of well-like vertical shafts visible at ground level. This taps into groundwater and delivers it to the surface at a lower level some distance away, via gravity, therefore eliminating the need for pumping. The vertical shafts along the underground channel are for maintenance purposes, and water is typically used only once it emerges from the daylight point.”

In With The New, Out With The Old

You might think a system that functioned reasonably well for over 3,000 years would have proven its merit, but the allure of the new, new thing is strong in humans. Unfortunately, “progress” does not always result in improvement. In the 20th century, Iran turned away from qanats and adopted new ideas in hydrology. In essence, it began building dams and drilling tens of thousands of wells each year. That allowed it to tap the ground water directly, which meant it neglected its qanats.

A drought that has lasted more than 5 years in northern Iran, where Tehran is located, has exacerbated the fresh water problem. The issue has become so severe that the government of Iran has been actively considering relocating Tehran and its 10 million residents to other parts of the country less affected by drought.

“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,” 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, told Yale 360.  He said the majority of Iran’s underground water reserves have been pumped dry and estimates more than 210 cubic kilometers [50 cubic miles] of stored water have been lost since the 21st century began.

Building Dams

“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 Alabama’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, while lowering river flows downstream and drying up wetlands and underground water reserves. Sharp eyed readers will recognize those are precisely the negative consequences the qanat system was designed to address.

Iran’s neighbors are exacerbating the crisis. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are on their own dam building spree, which is further reducing the flow of water into Iran. 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 River,” says Mitchell. That is a threat to water supplies in much of eastern Iran, including Iran’s second largest city, Mashhad.

Distracted Drilling

While surface waters suffer, the situation underground is even worse. In the past 40 years, Iranians have sunk more than a million wells meant to irrigate crops so the country could grow most of its own food. That was necessary because of global trading sanctions that made importing food difficult. That seemed like a good idea, but the result has been rampant over-pumping of aquifers that once held copious amounts of water.

A recent international study of 1,700 underground water reserves in 40 countries found that 32 of the world’s 50 most over-pumped 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, a geographer at University College London. In each of those areas, water tables are falling by up to 10 feet a year.

Agriculture is the prime culprit, says Mitchell. In Iran, some 90% 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%. 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 adventures.

The 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, Iran’s president said recently. The Makran region on the shores of the Gulf of Oman is seen as the most likely location for the project. “History will never forgive us for what [deep wells] have done to our qanats,” Mohammad Barshan, director of the Qanats Center in Kerman, told Yale 360.

Climate & Drought

The mismanagement of Iran’s water resources is inexcusable, but is made worse by the effects of a warming planet. Droughts have combined with warmer temperatures to reduce winter snow cover — a major source of groundwater replenishment in the mountains.

Lake Urmia in northwest Iran was once the Middle East’s largest lake, covering more than 2,300 square miles. But NASA satellite images taken in 2023 showed it had almost completely dried up. Similarly, the Hamoun wetland, straddling the Iran-Afghan border on the Helmand River, once covered some 1,500 square miles and was home to abundant wildlife, including a population of leopards. Now it is mostly lifeless salt flats.

Hydrologists warn that much of the damage to aquifers is permanent. As they dry out, their water-holding pores collapse. As qanats dry up, they too cave in, which is causing an epidemic of subsidence. According to Iranian remote sensing expert Mahmud Haghshenas Haghighi, now at Leibniz University in Germany, subsidence affects more than 3.5% of the country. Ancient cities once reliant on qanats, such as Isfahan and Yazd, are seeing buildings and infrastructure damaged on a huge scale. Geologists call it a “silent earthquake.”

But, while surface structures can be repaired, the geological wreckage underground cannot. “Once significant subsidence and compression occurs, much of the… water storage capacity is permanently lost and cannot be restored, even if water levels later rise,” says Mitchell.

Experts suggest Iran is losing about 20% of its rainfall to flash floods that flow uncollected into the ocean. They believe 80% of those floodwaters could be redirected into aquifers to supply the qanat system. Yet the hydrologists say the idea of tapping this water has been almost entirely rebuffed by the government.

Critics say Iranian officials are closely aligned with politically well connected engineers bent on constructing ever more big projects such as dams. Government corruption is not limited western nations, apparently.

Desalinization

More dams make no sense when rivers are already dry. More wells make no sense when there is no water left to tap. They just hasten water bankruptcy, Yale 360 claims. There is currently a plan underway to build a complex and expensive saltwater desalinization system on the shores of the Persian Gulf and pump it through some 2,300 miles of pipelines to parched provinces. But the high cost of desalination, pipes, and pumping makes it far too expensive for agriculture.

Desalinization is used by many countries in the Middle East and — surprise! surprise! — those facilities have now become prime targets for military adventurism in the area as Pete Hegseth and the Moron Of Mar-A-Loco seek to reshape the world and usher in Armageddon so everyone who is not a white christian nationalist will be incinerated.

Water is critical to a modern civilization. Without it, there is no agriculture and no commercial activity. We insist we can have never ending growth, but fail to take into account that growth is utterly dependent on simple basics — like water. No matter what the outcome of the current military operations in the Middle East, that is a constant that will never change. It is astonishing how so many supposedly smart people can overlook such basic realities.