XPost: soc.culture.iranian, talk.environment, sac.politics   
   XPost: talk.politics.guns   
   From: 9898@news.usenetexpress.com   
      
   More than international sanctions, more than its stifling theocracy,   
   more than recent bombardment by Israel and the U.S. — Iran’s greatest   
   current existential crisis is what hydrologists are calling its rapidly   
   approaching “water bankruptcy.”   
      
   It is a crisis that has a sad origin, they say: the destruction and   
   abandonment of tens of thousands of ancient tunnels for sustainably   
   tapping underground water, known as qanats, that were once the envy of   
   the arid world. But calls for the Iranian government to restore qanats   
   and recharge the underground water reserves that once sustained them are   
   falling on deaf ears.   
      
   After a fifth year of extreme drought, Iran’s long-running water crisis   
   reached unprecedented levels in November. The country’s president,   
   Masoud Pezeshkian, warned that Iran had “no choice” but to move its   
   capital away from arid Tehran, which now has a population of about 10   
   million, to wetter coastal regions — a project that would take decades   
   and has a price estimated by analysts at potentially $100 billion.   
      
   While failed rains may be the immediate cause of the crisis,   
   hydrologists say, the root cause is more than half a century of often   
   foolhardy modern water engineering — extending back to before the   
   country’s Islamic revolution of 1979, but accelerated by the Ayatollahs’   
   policies since.   
      
   A long-discussed plan to move the capital from Tehran to the wetter   
   south is now “no longer optional” but a necessity. “The government   
   blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water   
   security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning   
   and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a former deputy head of the   
   country’s environment department and now director of the United Nations   
   University’s Institute of Water, Environment and Health.   
      
   “The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the   
   dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of   
   disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a   
   former deputy head of the country’s environment department and now   
   director of the United Nations University’s Institute of Water,   
   Environment and Health.   
      
   To meet growing water shortages in the country’s burgeoning cities,   
   “Iran was one of the top three dam-builders in the world” in the late   
   20th century, says Penelope Mitchell, a geographer at the University of   
   Alabama’s Global Water Security Center. Dozens were built on rivers too   
   small to sustain them. Rather than fixing shortages, the reservoirs have   
   increased the loss of water due to evaporation from their large surface   
   areas, she says, while lowering river flows downstream and drying up   
   wetlands and underground water reserves.   
      
   Today, many of the reservoirs behind those dams are all but empty.   
   Iran’s president made his call to relocate the capital after water   
   levels in Tehran’s five reservoirs plunged to 12 percent of capacity   
   last month.   
      
   Iran’s neighbors are exacerbating the crisis. In Afghanistan, the source   
   of two rivers important to Iran’s water supplies (the Helmand and   
   Harirud), the Taliban are on their own dam-building spree that is   
   reducing cross-border flows. The Pashdan Dam, which went into operation   
   in August, “means Afghanistan can control up to 80 percent of the   
   average stream flow of the Harirud,” says Mitchell, threatening water   
   supplies to much of eastern Iran, including Iran’s second largest city,   
   Mashhad.   
      
   While surface waters suffer, the situation underground is even worse. In   
   the past 40 years, Iranians have sunk more than a million wells fitted   
   with powerful pumps. The aim has been to irrigate arid farmland to meet   
   the country’s goal of food self-sufficiency in a hostile world of trade   
   sanctions. But the result has been rampant overpumping of aquifers that   
   once held copious amounts of water.   
      
   The majority of Iran’s precious underground water reserves have been   
   pumped dry, says Madani. He estimates a loss of more than 210 cubic   
   kilometers [50 cubic miles] of stored water in the first two decades of   
   this century.   
      
   Iran is far from alone in overpumping its precious national water   
   stores. But a recent international study of 1,700 underground water   
   reserves in 40 countries found that a staggering 32 of the world’s 50   
   most overpumped aquifers are in Iran. “The biggest alarm bells are in   
   Iran’s West Qazvin Plain, Arsanjan Basin, Baladeh Basin, and Rashtkhar   
   aquifers,” says coauthor Richard Taylor, geographer at University   
   College London. In each, water tables are falling by up to 10 feet a   
   year.   
      
   https://e360.yale.edu/features/iran-water-drought-dams-qanats   
      
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