First a Water Crisis, Then Unrest
came a crippling drought, lasting roughly 14 years.
A panel of retired United States military officials warned recently that water stress would become “a growing factor in the world’s hot spots and conflict areas.”
“With escalating global population and the impact of a changing climate, we see the challenges of water stress rising with time,” the retired officials concluded in the report by CNA, a research organization based in Arlington, Virginia.
Climate change is projected to make Iran hotter and drier. A former Iranian agriculture minister, Issa Kalantari, once said that water scarcity would make Iran so harsh that 50 million Iranians would leave the country altogether.
Water alone doesn’t explain the recent protests in Iran. But as David Michel, an analyst at the Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington, put it, the lack of water is a marker of the government’s failure to deliver basic services.
“Water is not going to bring down the government,” he said. “But it’s a component — in some towns, a significant component — of grievances and frustrations.”
Managing water, he said, is the “most important policy challenge.”
Like many countries, from India to Syria, Iran set out to be self-sufficient in food after the 1979 revolution. But as the Iranian water expert Kaveh Madani said, it meant the government encouraged farmers to plant thirsty crops like wheat throughout the country. The government offered farmers cheap electricity and favorable prices for their wheat — effectively a generous two-part subsidy that served as an incentive to plant more wheat and extract more groundwater.
The result: “25 percent of the total water that is withdrawn from aquifers, rivers and lakes exceeds the amount that can be replenished” by nature, according to Claudia Sadoff, a water specialist who prepared a report for the World Bank on Iran’s water crisis.
Iran’s groundwater depletion rate is today among the fastest in the world, so much so that by Mr. Michel’s calculations, 12 of the country’s 31 provinces “will entirely exhaust their aquifers within the next 50 years.” In parts of the country, the groundwater loss is causing the land to sink.
Water is a handy political tool, and to curry favor with their rural base, Iran’s leaders — and particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — dammed rivers across the country to divert water to key areas. As a result, many of Iran’s lakes have shrunk. That includes Lake Urmia, once the region’s largest saltwater lake, which has diminished in size by nearly 90 percent since the early 1970s.
Iran expects a 25 percent decline in surface water runoff — rainfall and snow melt — by 2030. In the region as a whole, summers are predicted to get hotter, by two to three degrees Celsius at current rates of warming, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Rains are projected to decline by 10 percent.
A 2015 study by two scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology predicted that, at current rates of warming, “many major cities in the region could exceed a tipping point for human survival.”
For the leaders of water-stressed countries, the most sobering lesson comes from nearby Syria. Its drought, stretching from 2006 to 2009, prompted a mass migration from country to city and then unemployment among the young. Frustrations built up.
And in 2011, street protests broke out, only to be crushed by the government of Bashar al-Assad. It piled on to long- simmering frustrations of Syrians under Mr. Assad’s authoritarian rule. A civil war erupted, reshaping the Middle East.
Water, said Julia McQuaid, the deputy director of CNA, a research group in Virginia, doesn’t lead straight to conflict. “It can be catalyst,” she said. “It can be a thing that breaks the system.”
Tehran strove for food independence. Then a drought hit.