Iran is entering a new, dark phase of its water crisis, as the war turns already depleted water resources into a strategic target and a tool for the regime’s political survival.
Tehran’s accusation that the US bombed a desalination plant on the island of Qeshm, as well as the Iranian attack on a desalination plant in Bahrain, show that the battle for water in the Persian Gulf goes beyond borders and threatens millions of people in one of the most arid regions of the planet.
For decades, the Islamic Republic has dealt with the climate crisis with short-term solutions and a policy of denial, until reality caught up with it: the dams that feed Tehran are now operating at capacity, average rainfall has fallen by up to 45% below normal levels, and the state meteorological service is openly talking about a “day of zero water,” when the taps will simply stop running.
President Masoud Pezheskian has warned that the capital has become “uninhabitable” and has publicly opened the discussion of relocating it, in a country where water collapse is directly linked to internal security and political stability.
Water, War and Security in the Persian Gulf
The Iranian leadership has complained that the bombing of the desalination plant on the island of Qeshm cut off water supplies to about 30 villages, affecting an already vulnerable population living in coastal, climate-stressed zones.
Washington
denies any involvement, but the chain of attacks on water infrastructure – culminating in the Iranian attack on a desalination plant in Bahrain – has already opened a dangerous debate about whether water will henceforth be a legitimate target in future conflicts in the region.
Gulf countries rely critically on desalination to quench the thirst of their populations and industry, and any attack on such infrastructure directly translates into a threat to food security, internal unrest and new refugee flows.
At the same time, inside Iran, the water crisis, the economic suffocation from the war and the power outages are an explosive mix that experts warn could lead from an empty glass of water to a street full of protesters.
Water, corruption and “monuments of failure”
Tehran’s official narrative systematically blames climate change, but the numbers and studies show that nature made the rains, politics made the water shortage.
After the 1979 Revolution, the regime engaged in a frenzied construction race of dams and reservoirs, often in the wrong locations, based on power and contracts rather than ecology; today many of these dams are almost empty, “monuments of failure” that evaporate whatever water they have left under ever-increasing temperatures.
At the same time, over 80% of the country’s renewable water resources are consumed by an extremely wasteful agriculture, with yields that do not justify the sacrifices, while households are limited to about 10% of use, but are the permanent target of “saving” campaigns.
Behind the numbers lie thousands of hidden or illegal wells, a clientelistic licensing system, and the silencing of those scientists and activists who warned in time that the country was heading towards “water bankruptcy” – a bankruptcy that will not be measured only in cubic meters of water, but in social cohesion and lost generations.
Water lost forever
According to studies mapping 1,700 aquifers in 40 countries, 32 of the world’s 50 most over-exploited basins are in Iran, a finding that suggests the country has been pumping far more groundwater than it can naturally replenish for years.
The continued pumping has caused dramatic land subsidence—some areas of central Iran are sinking by more than 35 centimeters a year—and scientists warn that the permanent compression of aquifers amounts to a loss of storage space for water that will never return.
The annual groundwater deficit, estimated at about 1.7 billion cubic meters, is comparable to the combined capacity of the five dams that supply Tehran with water, making it clear that the country is essentially “consuming” its future safety reserves to meet its present needs.
In this context, proposals such as importing water from the Gulf of Oman look more like communication aspirins than a strategic recovery plan: they do not address overconsumption, do not correct corruption, do not restore the damaged basins.
Experts speak of a “virtually unrecoverable” situation and call for a complete model overhaul: from the logic of pharaonic projects and self-sufficiency at all costs, to a new policy of scarcity management, restoration of aquifers and strengthening the resilience of communities, according to the New York Times.
However, while the geopolitical agenda advocates strengthening military and nuclear capabilities and supporting armed allies abroad, water at home remains without political priority, slowly transforming the whole of Iran into a laboratory of how a country collapses when its most basic source of life dries up.
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