Iran is running out of water, and the alarms are no longer abstract. Masoud Pezeshkian, the president of the Islamic Republic, openly discusses the need for massive internal migration due to water shortages. Intensified by chronic mismanagement and a succession of scorching, rain-starved years, reservoirs have plunged to historic lows, many farm lands have withered into dust bowls, and an emblematic inland sea - Lake Urmia - has largely vanished. This is not a far-off climate parable or a future scenario for environmental modelers; it is a present-tense emergency with humanitarian, economic, and security consequences that are already beginning to spill beyond Iran’s borders. The international community must pay close attention: Iran’s trajectory, aggressive resource overuse and rigid governance colliding with climate anomalies, is a grim preview of the instability awaiting arid regions worldwide.
The crisis is most visible and volatile in Tehran, a sprawling metropolis of over 10 million people. The capital relies on a delicate network of five large dams that have fallen to critical levels. Officials have acknowledged that at least one reservoir is effectively empty, while the Amir Kabir dam, a primary artery for the city’s hydration, holds only a tiny fraction of its capacity. These numbers translate into weeks, not months, of safety margins. Tehran is now racing toward its own "Day Zero," a concept once associated with Cape Town, implying the moment when taps run dry and water distribution becomes a militarized operation. The city faces the specter of severe rationing, pressure reductions that cut off upper floors of high-rises, and the terrified imagination of neighborhood-scale evacuations should storage slip beneath operable intakes.
Head east to Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city, and the situation becomes even more precarious. As a major pilgrimage center hosting millions of visitors annually, Mashhad’s water consumption is immense, yet the dams feeding the city have dipped to single-digit capacity percentages. The city is now forced to lean heavily on aquifers that are already irreversibly stressed. The choices facing local officials are stark: deepen the drawdown of groundwater, accelerating land subsidence that is already cracking infrastructure, or impose immediate, crippling rationing on households and the jagged network of small businesses that support the pilgrimage economy.
Then there is Lake Urmia. Once among the world’s largest saline lakes, it serves today as a cautionary salt flat ringed by toxic dust. Over recent decades, the lake has lost the vast majority of its surface area. This was not an accident of nature, but a man-made disaster. Dozens of dams on feeder rivers and diversions for thirsty crops upstream strangled the lake, while a hotter, drier climate evaporated what little inflow remained. The result is ecological collapse with a massive human toll: salt and dust storms that scorch crops and damage lungs, forcing communities to abandon their ancestral lands.
This agricultural policy is at the heart of the water bankruptcy. Roughly 90 percent of all water withdrawn in Iran flows to farms, often via outdated flood irrigation methods. The state provided cheap electricity to pump groundwater and subsidized water rates to buy rural loyalty. But the bill has finally come due. As rivers dry and wells shrink, crop yields are falling, and rural incomes are collapsing. The social impacts are profound: hundreds of villages have been abandoned in the past two decades, driving a wave of internal migration to the margins of cities that are themselves running out of water.
Technically, the solutions are clear: a national sprint to modernize irrigation, a hard stop on illegal well-drilling, and a shift to treating water as a scarce economic good. However, there is a fatal flaw in this prescription: meaningful water reform is impossible under the current Islamic Republic.
The regime is structurally incapable of solving this crisis because it is the primary architect of it. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), through its construction conglomerate Khatam al-Anbiya, dominates the country’s water infrastructure. This "water mafia" profits immensely from the endless construction of dams and transfer tunnels, regardless of their ecological devastation. To implement conservation, which requires dismantling the current policy of “building dams, drilling wells”, would need the regime to dismantle its own patronage network and cut off a key revenue stream for its security apparatus.
Furthermore, the regime’s economic survival strategy relies on the ideological pillar of "food self-sufficiency" to resist international sanctions; although Iran is a semi-arid country, surprisingly, the destructive policy of self-sufficiency is rooted in the constitution of the Islamic Republic. Abandoning water-intensive wheat production for sustainable imports would require admitting that the "resistance economy" has failed, a political suicide the leadership cannot afford. Instead of empowering environmental experts, the state imprisons them. Instead of transparency, it treats water data as a state secret. The political system is built to extract, not to steward.
Why should the world care? Because this water bankruptcy will not respect political boundaries. The hollowing out of Iran’s rural interior is creating a class of climate refugees who will not stay put. Internal displacement can easily metastasize into external migration, straining the borders of Turkey and causing friction with neighbors like Iraq and Afghanistan over shared watersheds. Furthermore, dust and salt storms from dried wetlands cross provinces and borders, degrading air quality and health across the Middle East.
The clock is running, and water, once taken for granted, is now the only headline that matters. But as long as the current political order remains, the taps will continue to run dry.
Mehdi Ketabchy is a water resources consultant in the private sector. He holds degrees in water resources engineering from Virginia Tech and Sharif University of Technology and is currently conducting research at the University of Maryland.
Saeed Ghasseminejad is an economist and senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
