In Iran, some are chasing the last drops of water NYT warns of upcoming humanitarian disaster

Lawmakers are warning that one province in Iran will run out within three months, and the shortage is inflaming tensions with the country’s neighbors, analysts of The New York Times claim in their recent article.

Summer has come to Sistan and Baluchistan province, an impoverished fragment of chapped earth and shimmering heat in Iran’s southeast corner, and all people there can talk about is how to get water.

For weeks now, taps in cities like Zahedan have yielded nothing but a salty, weakening trickle. In the villages where water pipes have never reached, the few residents who remain say people can barely find enough water to do the laundry or bathe themselves, let alone fish, farm, or sustain livestock.

“Sometimes, just to wash the dishes, we have to wait for so long,” said Setareh, 27, a university student in Zahedan, the provincial capital. “Everything from cooking to other chores is an ordeal for us.”

Drought has stalked Iran for centuries, but the threat intensified in recent years as political priorities trumped sound water management, experts say. Climate change has only made things worse in an area that typically gets no rainfall for seven months out of the year, and where temperatures can soar to 124 degrees in July.

Sistan and Baluchistan, where Iranian lawmakers warn the water will run out altogether within three months, might sound like an extreme case. But other regions are not far behind. Drought is forcing water cuts in the capital, Tehran, shrinking Lake Urmia, the largest saltwater lake in the Middle East, and the livelihoods that came with it, and stoking mass migration from Iran’s countryside to its cities.

Now, the hazards have spread to Iran’s borders, where water disputes are inflaming tensions with neighboring countries like Turkey and Afghanistan. A long-running disagreement between Iran and Afghanistan over rights to the Helmand River, which supplies Sistan and Baluchistan but has provided less water over time, peaked in late May when two Iranian border guards and an Afghan soldier were killed in clashes along the border near the river’s mouth.

Iranian groundwater and wetlands are irreversibly depleted, water experts say. Because of climate change, Iran can expect hotter temperatures and longer dry spells, as well as a greater risk of destructive floods.

Yet the country continues to spend precious water on agriculture, which does little to expand the economy but keeps people working in rural Iran, where many government supporters live. It is also developing already-thirsty areas that will only demand more water.

“Iran is in a water bankruptcy trap and it cannot get out. Unless you cut off consumption, the situation is not going to get better,” said Kaveh Madani, a water expert at the United Nations and the City University of New York who was once a deputy vice president of Iran. “Neighboring countries are suffering from the same issue. Water is becoming more scarce in the region, and competition over water will increase.”

Mismanagement of Iran’s water goes back at least to Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who ruled Iran before being deposed in its 1979 Islamic Revolution. He dedicated scarce water to building up agriculture, helping to desiccate the ancient Persian system of underground aqueduct-like canals known as qanats.

After the revolution thrust Iran into global isolation, its authoritarian clerical leadership doubled down on agriculture, aiming to produce all the food the country needed at home instead of having to import it. Subsidies for agriculture kept farmers in rural areas employed, satisfying a key political constituency of the government, experts say.

But this emptied aquifers faster than they could be replenished and encouraged farmers to drill illegal wells when they ran out, which only worsened the problem.

So many illegal wells were drilled to irrigate rice and wheat crops around the UNESCO world heritage site of Persepolis, in south-central Iran, that the ground is sinking, threatening the ancient ruin, local media reported last year.

Sistan and Baluchistan province depends on the Helmand River, which runs from the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan to the Hamoun wetlands in southeastern Iran, providing critical water for drinking, fishing and farming to people in both countries. But as the river’s flow has shrunk, the wetlands have gone dry.

Experts said it was not clear what was causing the water shortage, but they predicted the situation would worsen as agriculture and other development increased along Afghanistan’s share of the river.

Members of Iran’s parliament said in an open letter last week that Sistan and Baluchistan’s water reserves would be exhausted by mid-September, leaving the provincial population of about two million with little choice but to leave.

Like other Iranian officials, they accused Afghanistan’s Taliban administration of restricting the river’s flow in violation of a 1973 treaty that divided the rights to its waters, and they demanded that the Taliban reopen the spigot. Afghanistan, however, says there is simply less water to send.

Long neglected by the government, the inhabitants of Sistan and Baluchistan were quick to join the antigovernment protests that erupted across Iran last September after the death in police custody of a young woman. Though demonstrations in the province were violently suppressed, they outlasted protests in other regions.