Iran’s water shortage crisis is neither new or surprising and was predicted by experts and officials several years ago. As far back as 2015, former Iranian agriculture minister, Isa Kalantari, warned that water scarcity would force 50 million Iranians to leave the country. Later, he claimed that a 'water war' might hit rural areas. However, this early warning has not triggered an effective policy to preempt or solve the crisis already hitting the country. More than 12,000 villages have run out of water and around 7,000 rely entirely on water deliveries by tankers, according to Hamid-Reza Mahbubfar, a member of Environmental Risks and Sustained Development. The ecologist explained that 90 percent of surface and underground water resources have been used up.
The water crisis triggered a series of political upheavals due to its implications for the population in affected villages and towns. In recent weeks, protests broke out in several Iranian cities over water scarcity and the resulting environmental problems.
The triggers
Iran’s water crisis was the outcome of several factors that can be outlined as follows:
1- Geography: Iran’s water crisis is deeply rooted in the unequal distribution of water resources and varying usage across the country’s regions. This resulted in poor water management policies , since it didn’t provide supplies to scarcity-hit regions, by diverting rivers and building dams.
The annual average rainfall in Iran is 250 mm, which is less than one-third of the global average. Rainfall highly varies across Iran’s governorates, where the most populated regions receive the lowest rainfall. Additionally, climate change and rising temperature are expected to exacerbate the risk of drought in some regions.
2- Irrational policies: Iran ranks 131st globally for successfully managing its water resources, according to international reports. This is a clear indication that the Iranian authorities’ irrational water management policies are a major cause of the country’s water crisis. Experts believe that the government’s plans, which are mainly focused on constructing dams and excessive use of underground water resources and high-capacity pumps over the past three decades, have led to depletion of the country’s water resources and eventually to the current drought.
Agriculture is another field of Iran’s irrational policies. Although it accounts for only 10 per cent of the country’s GDP, the agricultural sector is the largest consumer of the country’s water resources at 92 per cent. Additionally, farmers grow water-intensive crops and mostly use canal-based irrigation systems. Water used for agriculture is hardly reusable due to pesticide pollution.
For example, Iran expanded wheat farming as part of policies to achieve self-sufficiency and maintain food security amid years-long sanctions. The Iranian regime’s overall goal is to build a ‘resistant economy’. In 2014, Tehran announced that the country achieved wheat self-sufficiency and claimed that it needed no more wheat imports. In 2018, Iran became an exporter of the strategic product. But despite the achievement, water scarcity threatens Iran’s self-efficiency, and even the country’s production of other crops as well as exports of the agricultural and electricity sectors to neighboring countries due to falling hydropower production.
Double-layered implications
Water scarcity is a major cause of Iran’s internal as well as external crises. Iran shares some of its water resources, such as large rivers, some of which originating from Iran itself, with its neighbors. These can be explained as follows:
1- Internal crises: since early 2021, the driest year in Iran’s history, several Iranian provinces have been facing a severe crisis trying to secure water supplies for their villages and towns. In Ahwaz, Karmanshah, Sistan and Balochistan, Isfahan and Ardabil, wide protests broke out over water scarcity which rendered agricultural lands arid. Khuzestan province was the hardest-hit by water shortages which sparked the largest protests. The root cause is the Iranian government policy towards the province, which is mainly based on diverting the largest rivers and constructing more dams to supply central governorates and ignoring the needs of the population in Khuzestan itself. For long years, the province has been subjected to discriminatory policies, namely those developed to manage water resources. A main highlight is a diversion project in Beheshtabad, developed and constructed by Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarter, which is part of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps., Yet, the work on the project stopped for years due to technical issues.
Protests over water shortages, which began on July 15 continue to sweep Khuzestan province, although, in their statements, Iranian officials showed interest in the upheaval, and announced that work is underway to provide water supplies to the affected population in villages and towns, and launch projects to construct a water pipeline to carry supplies to 702 villages. Recurrent protests and upheaval over water shortages in Khuzestan, which broke out for the first time in 2005, renew every year. Back then, massive protests were triggered by a leaked letter allegedly written by Mohammad Ali Abtahi, an adviser to Iran's former President Mohammad Khatami, in which he calls for changing the demography of Khuzestan and reduce the proportion of the Arab population through diverse policies, including forced displacement to northern Iran and even changing the environment of the province. One of the tools for carrying out the said plan was diversion of the province’s rivers and subsequently forcing farmers to leave their lands for other agricultural provinces.
2- External pressures: Water mismanagement is a major cause of disputes between Iran and its neighbors, especially Iraq and Afghanistan, over management of shared water resources. Although Iran signed several agreements with the two countries on regulating the use of common water resources, a number of issues strain their relations. These can be outlined as follows:
a- Dams in Afghanistan: the main cause of Iran’s issues with Afghanistan over the management of common water resources lies in Kabul’s construction of dams on rivers, which tributaries run through Iran. The Helmand river which rises in the Afghan mountains and feeds into Lake Hamun, which lies on the border between the two countries.
Afghanistan’s insistence on building dams on common rivers with Iran angers Tehran, which claims that they deprive Iranians from benefiting from river waters running from central Afghanistan. Tehran has long sought to gain leverage inside Afghanistan to pressure Kabul and dissuade it from making such decisions on building dams. The latest of these dams to be the cause of renewed dispute between the two countries is Kamal Khan dam in Nimruz Province bordering Iran. Officially opened in March 2021, the dam was built at a cost of $78 million over four years of push-and-pull between the two countries over its impact on Iran’s share of the river’s flow. In the opening ceremony, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani asserted that his country will begin giving Iran water in exchange for oil.
It is worth noting that Iran had already built infrastructure projects to deal with river flow from Afghanistan but without the consent of Kabul, and even blocked several water management projects inside Afghanistan. In one case, the Afghan Ministry of Energy and Water said that the World Bank stopped funding one of Afghanistan’s large dams after it was informed that the project needs to be approved by Tehran. Afghanistan accused Iran of infliterating Afghan government institutions to gain information on the country’s water resources projects. Kabul was following in the steps of India, who accused Iran of the same moves aimed at blocking the Salma Dam, referred to as the Afghanistan India Friendship Dam in Herat Province. India later was able to open the dam in 2016 as part of reconstruction projects in Afghanistan.
b- Cutting Iraq’s share: despite the strategic relations between Iran and Iraq, shared water resources, especially in the Shatt al-Arab region, has been a major bone of contention between the two countries, despite their signing of several relevant agreements. The water crisis between Iran and Iraq was further exacerbated by water shortages which began to impact life in several Iranian provinces. This spurred Iran to build dams on the tributaries of River Tigris which naturally runs into Iraq because of the floodplain and level land. The dams reduced river flow to Iraqi governorates. The issue was compounded by Iran’s diversion of Karun River into its territory after it used to empty in Shatt al-Arab, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The diversion reduced the water level in the Tigris in Iraq, causing most of the Mesopotamian Marshes to dry up and throw both governorates of Basra and Diyala into a severe water shortage.
Within this context, Iraq’s Minister of Water Resources Mahdi Rasheed al-Hamdani on July 10, 2021, threatened that his country will refer the issue to international bodies if Iran insists on cutting off all flow of water to Diyala and refusing to respect agreements signed to share the impact of water scarcity hitting the region.
To conclude, internal and external implications of Iran’s water crisis are placing more pressure on the regime in Tehran. The crisis was caused by successive failures of water resources management, and ill-considered political decisions that serve other purposes. It pushed Iran into a dilemma as its water resources are drying up and its options for developing and rationalizing the resources are growing thinner. There is no doubt that one of the major internal challenges facing President-elect Ebrahim Raisi is water scarcity resulting in massive economic and social impact that can threaten the country’s stability, especially because of growing protests over the worsening economic and environmental situation across several Iranian provinces.
