As Iran enters its sixth consecutive year of drought, the evidence is overwhelming that the country could be the first in the modern era to suffer what hydrologists are calling “water bankruptcy.” The reservoirs supplying the county’s two largest cities, Tehran and Mashhad, dropped to an average of between 2% and 10% of capacity in 2025, according to Iranian state media. NASA satellite images show that Lake Urmia in the northwest of the country—once the largest lake in the Middle East, covering more than 2,300 square miles—has almost completely disappeared. And the Hamoun wetland, a vast ecosystem encompassing 1,500 square miles on the Helmand River along the Iran-Afghan border, has been reduced to a barren wasteland.
According to Kaveh Madani, director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, “The water bankruptcy problem of Iran is too obvious to be denied,” he said. But many in the government remain unwilling to change course. “I’m not convinced that the roots of the problem are well understood and that the leadership is ready to pay the political cost of the necessary fundamental reforms,” Madani added. This assertion is supported by the fact that Madani was forced to flee Iran mere months after the country’s Department of Environment recruited him from abroad to work on the water crisis.
While rising temperatures caused by climate instability are certainly a contributing factor, the “roots of the problem” referenced by Madani stem from the heedless mismanagement of Iran’s water supplies that “long predates the 1979 revolution,” according to an analysis by James Meadway in The Guardian. “Spurred on by visions of national modernisation and self-reliance, both the Shah of Iran and the Islamic Republic have overseen the ‘abandonment’ of Iran’s ancient qanat aquifer system.” Fred Pearce of Yale Environment 360 describes qanats as “gently sloping tunnels dug into hillsides in riverless regions to tap underground water,” which until recently served as “the main source of water for cities such as Tehran, Yazd, and Isfahan … Iran has an estimated 70,000 of these structures, most of which are more than 2,500 years old. Their aggregate length has been put at more than 250,000 miles.” In his article titled “After Ruining a Treasured Water Resource, Iran Is Drying Up,” Pearce states that “[u]nlike pumped wells, qanats are an inherently sustainable source of water. … [S]uch has been their durability that they were often called ‘everlasting springs.’”
The “destruction and abandonment” of the qanats that Pearce describes are due to “often foolhardy modern water engineering—extending back to before the country’s Islamic revolution … but accelerated by the Ayatollahs’ policies since.” As one of the top three dam-builders in the world since the 1950s, Iran built dams on many streams too small to sustain them, according to Pearce. “Rather than fixing shortages, the reservoirs have increased the loss of water due to evaporation from their large surface areas.” Other adverse effects include the lowering of downstream flows and the drastic reduction of environmental flows to wetlands.
The most disastrous policy, however, has been the drilling of deep wells into the country’s aquifers. “In the past 40 years,” writes Pearce, “Iranians have sunk more than a million wells fitted with powerful pumps” resulting in “rampant overpumping of aquifers.” A recent study published in Nature covering 1,700 aquifers in 40 countries titled “Rapid groundwater decline and some cases of recovery in aquifers globally” found that 32 of the world’s 50 most overpumped aquifers are located in Iran.
The emptying of aquifers not only reduces groundwater availability, it also results in massive land subsidence, as geological structures near the surface begin to collapse due to the removal of the groundwater that used to support them. Also known as a “silent earthquake,” subsidence can cause irreversible damage to groundwater resources because as aquifers “dry out, their water-holding pores collapse. As qanats dry up, they too cave in,” warns Pearce.
Experts agree that the most viable solution for saving Iran’s aquifers is to redirect infrastructure spending toward restoring the country’s qanats. But entrenched interests, including the engineering arm of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, have been very successful in blocking these efforts, according to Iran Watch. Known colloquially as the “water mafia,” beneficiaries of the current system have made vast fortunes drilling wells and building dams. They have every incentive to use their connections with the regime to maintain the status quo, making corruption the main driver of Iran’s water policy, rather than science or common sense.
While President Masoud Pezeshkian warns that Iran will have “no choice” but to relocate the capital away from parched Tehran unless drastic changes occur, the ruling clerics proclaim prayer as the preferred solution. Some readers may recognize the intransigence of Iran’s mullahs in their own local groundwater managers, who insist that lifeless springs and dry riverbeds are caused by divine drought, not glaring mismanagement. When elected officials urge people to simply pray for more rain, while dismissing the need for drought response measures and joint planning for their aquifers, their constituents can only wonder: Is this naïve ignorance of the facts or crass corruption to the core?
Trey Gerfers serves as general manager of the Presidio County Underground Water Conservation District.