Iran’s Drought Imperils the Regime

It’s not the obliteration of its nuclear facilities and ballistic missile factories, nor the assassination of more than a dozen of its generals and another dozen of its senior nuclear scientists, that will bring down the Iranian regime. It’s the catastrophic drought that affects all parts of Iran, forcing the government to limit water use to a few hours a day, and that may, according to President Masoud Pezeshkian, even require the state to evacuate ten million people in Tehran to places where the water supply has not been quite so catastrophically reduced. More on the drought, and why it could lead to the collapse of the regime, can be found here: “Thirsty nation: How water mismanagement could topple Iran’s leadership – analysis,” by Alex Winston, Jerusalem Post, November 13, 2025:

The numbers tell the story. Tehran’s Amir Kabir Dam now sits at just 8% capacity, and the capital’s reservoirs are half-empty. Water-pressure reductions have begun across the city, with officials quietly warning that the taps may soon run dry altogether.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has already admitted the unthinkable. “If it still does not rain, they [citizens] have to evacuate Tehran.”

Iran’s “Day Zero,” the phrase used when the government first declared emergency holidays to conserve resources, has gone from theoretical to imminent. The crisis is no longer a future scenario but is happening in real time, exposing the corrosion of a regime that has spent decades mismanaging its most basic lifeline.

The government blames climate change and sanctions for Iran’s water crisis. But the truth, as Iranian water experts repeatedly emphasize, lies in decades of human error: overbuilding dams, draining aquifers, and politicizing resource management.

Between 2012 and 2018, Iran more than doubled the number of its dams, from 316 to 647, many of which were built without environmental assessments. The result is a network of failing reservoirs, collapsing groundwater tables, and a 25 percent loss of urban water through decaying pipelines.

The regime has been reliant for its water management not always on those with the greatest expertise, but on those who are politically most loyal. It has also misallocated resources, spending tens of billions of dollars on its nuclear program, money that might otherwise have gone to repairing the decaying pipelines, full of leaks, that now lead to a loss of twenty-five percent of the urban water supply across Iran.

As the regime knows from experience, water shortages this severe cause popular protests that can only be suppressed with great force. That suppression of protests in Khuzestan and Isfahan between 2018 and 2021 did nothing to assuage, and everything to increase, the popular anger against a regime that has misallocated resources, using billions of dollars that could have paid for repairing the leaky pipelines throughout the country, on desalination plants using water piped in from the Persian Gulf, and on using the most advanced techniques in drip irrigation — those used in Israel — for agricultural purposes.

Israel, a country with few water resources, has had out of necessity to become a leader in the production, and husbanding, of water. Israeli farmers came up with the idea of drip irrigation to supply water droplets to each plant, rather than to spread water across an entire field. Israeli scientists have designed and built the most advanced desalination plants in the world. Other Israeli scientists have developed the device known as the WaterGen, that produces water out of the ambient air. And Israel is the world leader in turning wastewater into water suitable both for agricultural use and for drinking. Nearly 90% of wastewater in Israel is treated for such reuse.

If the drought continues, there will be mass protests across Iran. People will demand that the government stop spending tens of billions of dollars annually on nuclear facilities and ballistic missile plants that can be, and were destroyed, in twelve days of war last June with Israel. And even if they had not been destroyed, Iranians now ask, how does the possession of nuclear weapons improve our standard of living? They want that money to be spent, instead, on producing, through desalination plants, wastewater recycling plants and WaterGen, more water, and on husbanding water resources through the increased use of drip irrigation. Once the regime collapses, Israel — the world leader in desalination, in wastewater management, in the production of water from the air, and in drip irrigation — stands ready and eager to help. And the Iranians in exile who are now planning for a post-ayatollah era are eager to take up that Israeli offer.