In Iran, some hunt for the last drops of water
Summer has arrived in the provinces of Sistan and Baluchistan, an impoverished patch of barren earth and blistering heat in the southeastern corner of Iran, and all people can talk about is how to get water.
For weeks now, faucets in towns like Zahedan have been delivering nothing but a salty, weakening trickle. In the villages that the water pipes never reached, the few remaining residents say people can barely find enough water to do their laundry or bathe themselves, much less to fish, farm or support livestock.
“Sometimes we have to wait so long to wash the dishes,” says Setareh, 27, a university student in Zahedan, the provincial capital. “Everything from cooking to other chores is a trial for us.”
Drought has haunted Iran for centuries, but the threat has grown in recent years as political priorities took precedence over proper water management, experts say. Climate change has only made matters worse in an area that typically has no rain for seven months of the year and where July temperatures can reach 124 degrees.
Sistan and Baluchistan, where Iranian lawmakers are warning that the water will run out completely within three months, may sound like an extreme case. But other regions are not far behind. Drought is forcing water cuts in the capital Tehran, the shrinking of Lake Urmia, the largest saltwater lake in the Middle East, and the livelihoods that came with it, and fueling mass migration from Iran’s countryside to the cities.
Now the dangers have spread to Iran’s borders, where water disputes are fueling tensions with neighboring countries like Turkey and Afghanistan. A long-running disagreement between Iran and Afghanistan over the rights to the Helmand River, which supplies Sistan and Baluchistan but has supplied less water over time, came to a head in late May when two Iranian border guards and an Afghan soldier were killed in clashes along the border near the mouth of the river.
Iran’s groundwater and wetlands are irreversibly depleted, water experts say. Climate change means Iran can expect higher temperatures and longer dry spells, as well as a greater risk of destructive flooding.
Yet the country continues to spend precious water on agriculture, which contributes little to economic growth but keeps people employed in rural Iran, where many of the government’s supporters live. It is also developing already thirsty areas that will only demand more water.
“Iran is in a water bankruptcy trap and it is can’t get out. Unless you cut consumption, the situation will not get any better,” said Kaveh Madani, a water expert at the United Nations and the City University of New York who was once deputy vice president of Iran. Neighboring countries are facing the same problem. Water is becoming scarcer in the region and competition for water will increase.”
Iran’s mismanagement of water goes back at least to Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who ruled Iran before being overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He devoted the scarce water to building agriculture, thus destroying the ancient Persian system of underground aqueduct-like channels, known as qanats.
After the revolution pushed Iran into global isolation, the authoritarian leadership of the Church leaders doubled down on agriculture, aiming to produce all the food the country needed domestically instead of having to import it. Farm subsidies kept rural farmers in work, satisfying a key government political constituency, experts say.
But this drained aquifers faster than they could be replenished and encouraged farmers to drill illegal wells when they ran out, exacerbating the problem.
So many illegal wells have been drilled to irrigate rice and wheat crops around UNESCO-listed Persepolis, in south-central Iran, that the ground is sinking and threatening the ancient ruin, local media say. reported last year.
The focus on agriculture also diverted water from industrial use, which could have bolstered Iran’s economy as it faced Western sanctions designed to force it to curtail its nuclear activities, Mr Madani said.
The provinces of Sistan and Baluchistan depend on the Helmand River, which runs from the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan to the Hamoun wetlands of southeastern Iran, providing vital water for drinking, fishing and agriculture to people in both countries. But as the river’s flow has dwindled, the wetlands have dried up.
Experts said it was not clear what caused the water shortage, but they predicted the situation would worsen as agriculture and other developments along the Afghan stretch of the river increase.
That is what members of the Iranian parliament said in a open letter last week that Sistan and Baluchistan’s water resources would be depleted by mid-September, leaving the provincial population of about two million with little choice but to leave.
“We will face a humanitarian disaster,” the letter, signed by 200 lawmakers, warned.
Like other Iranian officials, they accused the Afghan Taliban government of restricting the river’s flow, in violation of a 1973 treaty dividing rights to the waters, and demanded that the Taliban reopen the tap. However, Afghanistan says there is simply less water to send.
At least for now, tensions seem to have eased.
Iranian ambassador in Kabul announced on Saturday that the Taliban had agreed to allow Iranian hydrologists to inspect the water level behind an Afghan dam.
That will not immediately bring relief to the inhabitants of Sistan and Balochistan. They said that previously people were mainly concerned about rising water prices and anemia. But now they are afraid that the water will be completely shut off.
Long ignored by the government, the residents of Sistan and Baluchistan quickly joined the anti-government protests that erupted across Iran last September after the death in police custody of a young woman. Although demonstrations in the province were violently suppressed, they lasted longer than protests in other regions.
The protests in the province centered on grievances far broader than water scarcity, reflecting what residents say is long-standing discrimination against Baluchs, an ethnic minority in Iran.
Concerns over water rights have gripped many more affluent and influential areas of Iran, including the central city of Isfahan, where the government’s diversion of the Zayanderud River sparked protests over its dry, cracked bed in 2021.
Under the Islamic Republic, dams were built to divert water to politically powerful areas, causing lakes to dry up, experts say. Faced with declining water levels, Iran has turned to new technical solutions, such as transferring water from one area to another and desalination of seawater, an energy-intensive and polluting practice.
The government is building a 1,000-kilometer pipeline to bring desalinated water from the Sea of Oman to Sistan and Baluchistan province and other parts of Iran. But even with such measures, it will be a struggle to reverse Iran’s rapid descent into water bankruptcy, experts said.
To tackle the root of the problem, the government “must quickly create non-agricultural jobs in the region so that farmers’ lives don’t have to be tied to jobs on the water,” said Mohsen Moosavi, a specialist in marine engineering. constructions. in the Iranian capital Tehran.
But for many in Sistan and Balochistan it is too late.
Seven years ago, Mohammad Ehsani, a filmmaker, interviewed farmers, herders and others who lived around the once fertile Hamoun wetlands for a documentary:Once Hamoun.” It shows a landscape full of ancient history and modern decay: hut-like houses in the dust where there used to be a lake; camels and sheep that drank from drops of rainwater, whatever moisture their owners could find; men stranded at home for lack of fish or other work.
When Mr. Ehsani visited four months ago, things were much worse, he said. In 2016, residents wanted to stay on their land despite the challenges. Now “you look at their eyes and you see pain,” he said. “Villages are emptying, one after the other.”
“The region,” he added, “has been destroyed.”