The war in Iran has exposed the country’s water problems, which had been pushed to the brink by climate change, overuse of agriculture and decades of mismanagement.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Saturday accused the United States of bombing a desalination plant on the island of Qeshm, affecting water supplies to 30 villages. The US government has denied responsibility for the attack.
The incident – and Iran’s subsequent bombing of a desalination plant in Bahrain – has raised fears that the US-Israel war with Iran could lead to broader attacks on critical water infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, threatening supplies for millions of people.
But Iran was already facing critical water shortages before the conflict.
“They are still in a state of crisis,” said Eric Lob, associate professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University. “There are still problems of water shortages and power outages and, if anything, the regime can now blame the conflict.”
Tehran, a city of 10 million people, has been affected by years of drought. Late last year, the country’s average rainfall fell to 45% below normal and the dams and reservoirs supplying the capital were operating at minimum capacity.
Story continues below this ad.
Iran’s meteorological organization said cities were on the verge of what it called “water day zero,” the point at which supply systems simply stop working. Before the war began, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian called for the relocation of the capital, saying that dwindling water supplies and other ecological stresses had “rendered the city uninhabitable.”
A torrential rain in December brought little relief because it fell on dry, degraded soil with little capacity to absorb rain, said Francesco Femia, co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security, a Washington research organization.
“For that reason and others related to poor water management, the rains also failed to fill Iran’s underground aquifers, leaving the country in a continuing state of severe water stress,” Femia said.
Climate change has had an influence. Drought cycles are becoming more frequent and severe, and last year marked one of the driest periods in the last 20 years for Iran. Extreme weather, such as a heat wave in 2023 that caused a two-day national shutdown when temperatures reached 123 degrees Fahrenheit, has worsened water shortages. At the same time, the melting of snow in the mountains that feeds the rivers has been decreasing.
Story continues below this ad.
But the Iranian government also dangerously deepened the crisis with decades of mismanagement, experts said.
After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran began to dramatically accelerate the construction of dams and reservoirs in a quest for water self-sufficiency. But many were built in poor locations and rising heat has intensified water evaporation.
“The priority was power and profit, rather than what made sense from an ecological or water point of view,” Lob said. Now many reservoirs are almost empty and have become what one critic called “monuments to failure.”
Iranian authorities have also silenced environmental activists and government officials who called for water issues to be taken more seriously. Instead of broader changes, officials implemented stopgap measures during the shortage, such as reducing water pressure and rationing water.
Story continues below this ad.
The country is also draining what remains of its groundwater. A 2024 study of 1,700 water reserves in 40 countries found that 32 of the 50 most exploited aquifers in the world are in Iran.
Authorities have proposed some long-term solutions, such as importing water from the Gulf of Oman. But the government has never made a serious effort to address the water crisis, instead focusing its resources on bolstering military and nuclear capabilities and supporting terrorist proxies throughout the region.
The destruction of the Qeshm desalination plant may have had only a modest impact on the country’s water problems, said Michael S. Gremillion, director of the Global Center on Water Security at the University of Alabama. But continued water shortages in Iran, coupled with the economic devastation of war, could lead to food shortages and cause residents to flee their homes.
“At least in the near future, the drought is not going to ease itself anytime soon,” Gremillion said, adding, “It’s going to cause a lot of problems.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
