Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, announced in November that if rains did not come, parts of the city would need to be evacuated. Thankfully, rain eventually fell around Tehran, easing immediate pressure on water supplies. But the city came too close to disaster. There is no reprieve from the danger of taps running dry, and the prospect of more rain appears grim.
The drought conditions in Iran are in part a result of climate change: Much of the Middle East, including Iran, is warming twice as fast as the global average, and climate change is altering precipitation cycles across the Iranian plateau. Winters are becoming shorter and drier; snowpack in the Zagros and Alborz Mountains — critical natural reservoirs that once fed rivers and aquifers during spring and early summer — is shrinking. When rain does fall, it increasingly comes in intense bursts that run off hardened ground rather than soak in, doing little to recharge groundwater.
Global warming, though, is only part of the problem. The Iranian water infrastructure has long suffered from a lack of investment, as well as from the illegal drilling of hundreds of thousands of wells that sustain agriculture and industry. The Iran Water Resources Management Company estimates that its workers seal around 13,000 illegal wells each year, or 250 a week, without making a major dent in the problem.
Other factors may contribute even more to the crisis: rapid urbanization, growing population and rising water use. Tehran’s population, for example, has risen from 700,000 during the 1940s to around 10 million today.
Such rapid growth is unsustainable, Mr. Pezeshkian has said, which is why he suggested the best course of action was to move the country’s capital to the Gulf of Oman coast.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/opinion/tehran-iran-water-drought-crisis.html
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