What will be the outcome of Iran’s water crisis

Where, in today’s world, do all our antagonisms and struggles for survival converge? Is there a singular point that embodies our universal predicament? It is not Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, or the scam centers in the north of Myanmar. It is Tehran.

The Iranian capital is counting down to a “day zero” when it will simply run out of water. Nor is it alone. Most of Iran is hurtling toward “water bankruptcy,” when demand will permanently exceed the natural supply. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian is now talking about moving the capital and mandating the evacuation of the population (nearly ten million).

The crisis reflects several factors. The immediate cause is a severe six-year drought. Even in the rainy season, Iran has received almost no rain. Moreover, water-intensive agriculture and subsidization of water and energy have overdrawn the country’s aquifers and depleted its groundwater supplies.

Then, there is the concentration of economic activity and employment in major urban centers, particularly Tehran, which has further strained water resources. The loss of groundwater has been so severe that parts of the Tehran plateau are sinking. Even if the rains do return, less will be stored as groundwater than in the past, because the physical space for it has contracted.

Since the sinking now underway is not uniformly distributed, the entire water and sewage system of Tehran is falling apart. Gas is leaking into the open air from broken underground channels.

Iran’s leaders have known about this problem for decades but always postponed any serious attempt to deal with it. Instead, the regime allocated resources to its nuclear program, foreign proxies like Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah, and military production, keeping the armed forces well-equipped and building the drones that Russia has been using to bomb Ukrainian cities.

Worse, now that the crisis has come to a head, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has created a “water mafia.” Lakes and rivers that have survived for thousands of years are being drained to supply water to whoever can afford it. The average household in Tehran is spending 10% of its income on water, and many people are going without baths and other basic hygiene while the regime directly profits from the crisis.

But why has this old and ongoing problem suddenly become a global news story? Is it because the West wants to set the stage for another Israeli/American attack (this time under the guise of yet another humanitarian intervention)? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already cynically exploited the situation, telling Iranians that if they rise up against the regime, Israel will send specialists to address the water shortages.

Aside from organizing mass prayers for rain, the regime has adopted the dubious strategy of spraying large amounts of chemical salts into the atmosphere. But rather than reliably inducing rain, such “cloud seeding” threatens to kill off vegetation and make breathing more difficult. People are increasingly staying home, and Iranian society is beginning to unravel.

As for the plan to move the capital, Pezeshkian’s statements have been rather ambiguous. Is he talking about the bulk of the population, or just the government administration? If it is the second option, what will happen to the millions of people left behind? If it is the first, the effort would take years and impose an unsustainable financial burden on the state – all without solving the fundamental problem.

Not surprisingly, tens of thousands of people in Tehran have begun to panic. Highways north of the city are jammed with cars trying to make their way to the Caspian Sea region, where there may still be enough water. But what would happen if these thousands of evacuees became millions? Turkey is the obvious first destination, followed by Europe. But what about the wealthy Arab states in the Gulf region? Why aren’t Iran’s immediate neighbors expected to provide more help?

Although the water crisis follows from a specific mix of natural causes and policy errors, Iran is not alone. Neighboring Afghanistan, for example, is pursuing large-scale irrigation projects to route water toward Kabul, which is also heading for water bankruptcy. Such projects are not without controversy, because they can have implications for water supplies elsewhere, including across borders. That is why Egypt, whose survival depends on the Nile River, objects so strenuously to Ethiopian dam projects.

What is to be done? While I don’t have any concrete proposals, the general solution seems clear: the world is going to need some form of communism. I don’t mean anything like 20th-century “actually existing socialism,” but rather something more obvious and elementary.

Neither authoritarian states nor multiparty democracies nor grassroots self-organization can address problems like those confronting Iran. When we are facing threats to our very survival as a civilized community, the only choice is to proclaim a large-scale emergency, which implies a de facto state of war – not against another state, but against those in one’s own country who are responsible for the crisis.

A state of emergency should not abolish markets and nationalize everything; but it should assert public control and regulate those areas of social life that have a direct bearing on the cause of the emergency. In this case, that means controlling the distribution of water. In Iran, the “water mafia” should have been crushed immediately.

The state power (which can move the fastest) must then be complemented by locally organized acts of solidarity, together with much stronger forms of international cooperation. Utopian? Not at all. The real utopia is believing that we can survive without such measures.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025. www.project-syndicate.org