Iran’s water crisis could be a political earthquake

Iranians are thirsty. In the past few weeks, thousands have taken to the streets in cities and towns across the Islamic Republic to protest the country’s worsening hydrological crisis — and the Iranian regime’s chronic mishandling of it. Beginning in mid-July in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan, protests erupted over water shortages caused by worsening drought conditions and longstanding government mismanagement. Since then, unrest has spread across the country.

The protesters have a lot to be angry about. In Khuzestan alone, more than 700 villages are now said to have difficulty accessing water, and many residents are forced to rely on the government’s water supply by truck. But the problem is bigger. According to Iranian government official statistics, at least 110 cities across the country have had to implement some form of water rationing or have experienced unrest this summer alone.

These conditions are a reflection of a deeper and longer-lasting malaise. Decades of outdated farming and irrigation systems, along with poor management and worse resource allocation, have led to a water crisis that is now national in scope. The result, according to Kafe Madani of Yale University, is that Iran is “basically bankrupt for water,” with demand far outstripping available supply. Simply put, “Iran is using its water resources unsustainably.”

It’s a problem experts have been warning about for years. In 2018, Mohammad Hossein Shariatmadar, head of Iran’s National Center for Strategic Agriculture and Water Management, warned that the Islamic Republic was “only five years away from a comprehensive water disaster as a result of five decades of mismanagement.”

That same year, 18 lawmakers from water-poor provinces in central Iran collectively resigned in a show to protest the increasingly unfair distribution of resources within the country. In an open letter, the parliamentarians demanded that the government take a more active role in ensuring that each of the country’s different regions receives a fair share of water – illustrating how water has become a defining issue in Iranian domestic politics.

And in 2019, the World Resources Institute, a senior environmental research center based in Washington, DC, ranked Iran as one of the world’s most “water-stressed” countries. According to the Water Resources Institute study, the Islamic Republic consumes about 80 percent of its available water resources each year. This situation means that “even small dry shocks – which are set to be amplified by climate change – can lead to catastrophic consequences,” the Water Resources Institute warned.

These consequences are now showing up on the streets of Tehran and other cities, as Iranians openly express their anger. For its part, the Iranian regime responded predictably. More than a hundred protesters have reportedly been arrested so far, some of them killed in clashes with government forces. The Iranian regime has also moved quickly to disrupt communications and the internet, building on lessons learned from successfully suppressing earlier rounds of domestic protests over the past several years.

However, there is good reason to believe that the current protests may ultimately be more than a passing inconvenience to the ayatollahs in Iran. For years, Iran’s diverse opposition groups have faced obstacles due to political differences and ideological divisions, preventing their integration into a sustainable movement. This has started to change recently. Earlier this year, under the slogan “No to the Islamic Republic,” a new civic campaign emerged to unite hundreds of activists, political figures and cultural figures opposed to the current regime.

Now, water can help keep these disparate forces consistent. That’s because the looming resource crisis as a result of decades of official mismanagement is a truly global problem – one that affects all strata of Iranian society, even those emerging from earlier rounds of anti-regime activism.

Quite simply, water scarcity has provided a common rallying point for all Iranians, as well as a common complaint against the Iranian regime.

It is a problem that the authorities in Tehran may find difficult to dispel.

Ilan Berman is Senior Vice President of the US Foreign Policy Council in Washington, DC, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing expert analysis to those who make or influence United States foreign policy, and to help world leaders build democracies and market economies. He chairs the Council’s Future of Public Diplomacy project.

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