The Iran water crisis is getting noticed. At last! A senior professor of sociology at Tehran University told Al-Monitor: “All these years we were discussing economy, politics, society and democracy. Now, however, these discussions all sound absurd to me. Given the current situation, we will either die of thirst or run away. I am no longer sure there was any point in all those discussions.”
- Fun boats along a dry Zayandeh Rood. Reuters image in Al-monitor
A dry Zayandeh-Rud, the tragedy of Lake Urmia, and the dustbowl that was once Lake Hamun are just the tip of a very dry iceberg:
- The drop in groundwater is at least 2 metres a year.
- Water loss in leaky pipes in cities can exceed 30%
- Water usage is twice the world standard – and the population has doubled in the last two decades
Massoumeh Ebtekar, the head of the Iranian Department of Environment, has warned that environmental problems in Tehran have reached a critical level. She said Tehran had reached its ecological limit in 1996 and any industrial expansion in Tehran should have been stopped after 1996.
Rouhani’s minister of energy, Hamidreza Chitchian, has issued a serious warning on the future of water in Iran.
Kaveh Madani has written a comprehensive outline of the problems, and suggested some solutions. He thinks that the Iranian government needs to take a longer term perspective; stop reactive management – curing symptoms while worsening the underlying causes; cut perverse incentives for waste; and cost water use more realistically.
Ebtekar has said that Rouhani’s administration is trying to help farmers reform their irrigation methods. But more is needed!