The city of Tehran is collapsing under the weight of multiple environmental crises. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian warned in October that moving Iran’s capital out of Tehran is “not a choice, but a necessity.” But while it may need to happen, it is also an impossibility, not least because of the incompetence and corruption of the regime.
The dams supplying Tehran with water now hold only 14 percent of their capacity; Lar Dam, one of the most crucial, is barely at 1 percent. Rainfall has been roughly 40 percent below long-term averages. Over-pumping of aquifers to make up the deficit has caused the ground beneath the city to sink by up to 25 centimeters per year, cracking roads, pipelines, and building foundations. Sinkholes have opened in residential neighborhoods, forcing homes to be evacuated, while subsidence has warped rail lines and sections of the Tehran Metro, and even runways at the city’s airports. These are not natural disasters, but the outcome of decades of unregulated extraction, political negligence, and short-term engineering projects driven by patronage networks.
Water scarcity has compounded a related energy crisis. While hydropower is a relatively small share of Iran’s energy mix, any cut is significant for an electrical grid that’s perpetually on the verge of disaster. The result is a dual water-energy shortfall: blackouts and rationing that strike the capital simultaneously. Even efforts to promote solar have become farcical, with officials urging cash-strapped energy producers to fund their own panels instead of fixing the state’s broken power system. For a country with the world’s second-largest gas reserves and abundant sunlight, these shortages reflect a failure of governance, not resources.
Tehran’s daily life reflects the same mismanagement. More than 42 million vehicle trips occur in Tehran each day, including 19 million full journeys from origin to destination and 23 million partial trips involving transfers or short segments. About 4 million cars and 1 million motorcycles clog the capital’s streets. Traffic generates about 83 percent of Tehran’s air pollution, and is roughly nine times the World Health Organization’s guidelines for what’s considered healthy. In 2024, air pollution was linked to more than 6,000 deaths, and the city saw only seven clean-air days. Smog trapped by the surrounding mountains keeps respiratory illness and infrastructural decay as permanent features of urban life.
Behind every symptom lies institutional rot. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ construction conglomerate, Khatam al-Anbiya, has built unregulated dams, diversion canals, and industrial sites that profit regime-linked firms while accelerating ecological collapse. Iran’s Energy Ministry and its subordinate Iran Water and Power Resources Development Company (IWPCO) have repeatedly financed concrete-heavy projects without hydrological or environmental assessments. These ventures divert water to politically connected industries, drain aquifers, and worsen subsidence across central Iran, not just the capital.
Despite its impending environmental collapse, Tehran remains the country’s economic core. The Greater Tehran Metropolitan Area holds about 15 million people, roughly 15 percent of Iran’s population, and generates more than 20 percent of national GDP. Tehran accounts for nearly half of all the nation’s tax revenue and hosts about 30 percent of the public-sector workforce and 45 percent of large industrial firms. Its 17,960 industrial plants employ one-quarter of Iran’s industrial labor force. Finance, real estate, construction, automobiles, chemicals, and steel form the backbone of this economic concentration.
The capital’s gravity has drawn millions of people from provinces hollowed out by drought and unemployment, which are even worse outside Tehran. Nationwide rainfall is down about 45 percent from previous years, and major dam reserves stand near 46 percent of capacity, with seven below 10 percent. All 31 of Iran’s provinces are facing some degree of water scarcity, and more than 40 cities face rationing. Former officials warn that unchecked climate decline could eventually displace up to 50 million people. That’s more than half of all Iranians.
The drying of Lake Urmia in the northwest, caused by unregulated dams and politically motivated water diversions, has unleashed salt storms that have pushed residents to leave. Rising temperatures and dust in Khuzestan, worsened by regime-backed transfers and mismanaged rivers, have driven similar outflows. In Isfahan, the near-disappearance of the Zayandeh Rud River, drained by canals feeding industries linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has devastated agriculture, sparking farmer protests and mass rural migration. Sistan and Baluchestan faces sharp decreases in rainfall and vanishing pastures, the result of neglected water accords and state over-pumping, forcing whole villages to be abandoned. Most displaced families gravitate toward Tehran, worsening overcrowding and strain.
Tehran province absorbs about 20 percent of all internal migrants, three times more than the next-largest destination. Roughly 88 percent of Tehran’s population growth now comes from migration rather than babies born to the city. Officials report that some 200,000 people move to Tehran each year.
The influx has expanded slums on the city’s outskirts, strained already scarce public services, and deepened social divides between the urban poor and the politically connected elite.
What was once a migration of opportunity has become one of survival, as displaced families move from dry farms to a capital that is itself running out of water. Rising inequality and urban congestion have made Tehran a pressure cooker of national discontent, one that the regime can neither reform nor relieve.
The Makran region, proposed as an alternative capital, faces rising sea levels, dust storms from the dried Jazmourian basin, water scarcity, and minimal infrastructure. Even if relocation were possible, the social, economic, and political weight built in Tehran over centuries cannot simply be transplanted — especially not by an incompetent and corrupt regime. Nor would it be possible to simply leave incompetence and corruption behind.
Tehran’s collapse is not just the story of a city breaking down under its own weight. It is the story of a country that has exhausted its land, its water, and its people, and now faces the reckoning it spent decades deferring.
Janatan Sayeh is the Iran research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies focused on Iranian domestic affairs and the Islamic Republic’s regional malign influence. Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, he studied Hebrew and Arabic at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received his B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.
