When It Comes to Water in Iran, There is No Good News

Iran is facing a water crisis that could bring down the Islamic regime. “Iran’s water crisis at tipping point in threat to Islamic regime’s stability,” by Ohad Merlin, Jerusalem Post, March 30, 2025:

The agricultural sector has been hit particularly hard. Farmers are being forced to abandon water-intensive crops like wheat and rice in favor of varieties more suited to drought conditions. Many are giving up farming altogether and migrating to cities in search of alternative employment.

But what “employment” will those flocking now to cities find? The Iranian economy is in free fall. In 1979, when the regime of the ayatollahs began, one US dollar was worth 70 Iranian rials. Today, after decades of Weimar-like inflation, a dollar is worth more than 42,000 rials. Over 25 million Iranians — about 30% of the population — now live below the poverty line.

“Crop variety is shrinking, and the country’s food security is being undermined,” Mazalian Levi warned. “There are real shortages of fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains, and oils, leading to rising food prices and increased dependence on imported food.”…

The food shortages are a direct result of the lack of water, both from the years of drought and from the mismanagement of what water there still is. Relying on water from aquifers is the very worst thing that the country could do, because it will take hundreds, if not thousands, of years to replenish the supply. Iran should have been putting the tens of billions it has spent on its nuclear program instead into more desalination plants and on perfecting the drop irrigation methods that deliver the ”individualized” drops of water, according to type of plant and to the time when the water will be most effective, that Israeli farmers have perfected.

Another actor directly affected by the water crisis in Iran is nature itself, as demonstrated by Lake Urmia, a salty lake located in northwestern Iran between the provinces of West Azerbaijan and East Azerbaijan.

According to Mazalian Levi, in the past, the lake was one of the largest salt lakes in the world and the largest in the Middle East at about 5,700 square kilometers. However, according to estimates, its area is now less than 1,000 sq.km.

Lake Urmia has drastically shrunk, both because of the drought that began five years ago, and because of the dams built on rivers and streams that used feed into the lake but do so no longer, to less than 15% of its former size.

When it comes to water in Iran, there is no good news. The country is now in the fifth year of its most severe drought. The dams once built to help farmers have now been opened to allow water from rivers and streams to again flow into the lake. The country that had 37 million inhabitants when Khomeini came to power now has 90 million. This has placed a colossal burden on water supplies. The Iranians have also mismanaged what water they do have. They chose to take water from their aquifers that took thousands of years to fill, and will take the same amount of time to refill. Instead, they should have been building more desalination plants on the Caspian Sea and on the Persian Gulf. They should have learned from the Israeli farmers how to deliver minute “drips” of water to irrigate plants in exactly the right amount and at exactly the right times.

But most of all, Iran stands on the brink of a catastrophic want of water because it foolishly chose to spend tens of billions of dollars on its nuclear program, as well as on building up a vast arsenal of conventional arms, rather than on advanced desalination plants, and on the latest water-saving techniques of drip irrigation.

There is nothing Iran can now do, under the current regime, to make the situation better. Even if the government recognized the folly of its past choices, would it dare admit that to an increasingly hostile people? And it takes a minimum of 2-3 years to build a desalination plant, while the cost varies from $300 million to $1 billion — money that Iran simply does not have.

If the water supply in Iran continues to be disastrous, and there is no reason to suggest it will not be, the population — already enraged with their government for its despotic ways, its mismanagement of the economy, its grotesque waste of money on a nuclear program that does nothing to improve the quality of Iranians’ lives and may well go up in plumes of smoke from Israeli or American bombs — are likely to revolt. Not as they did in 2009-2010, or in 2022, with demonstrations that were soon suppressed, but rather, the way they did in 1979, when the Shah’s regime was overturned by violent demonstrations all over the country.

Now if a revolt in Iran succeeded, it would result, as it did in 1979, in a new regime But instead of a barbaric theocracy, this time the Iranians would demand a secular state, with a parliamentary democracy, and likely with the Shah’s son given a figurehead role, like the English monarchs. Among the first acts of that new and sensible Iranian regime will be to reach out to Israel for help with its water supply, by providing the Iranians with lessons in waste water management (96% of the water used in Israel is recycled), detailed information about the latest advances in drip irrigation, desalination plants, and the production of water from the circumambient air.