Iran’s water and environmental crisis is too severe to be easily solved, even if the regime had the will or the way
David Rosenberg. Aug 21, 2025
What could bring down the regime in Iran? Years of sanctions have failed to do the trick. Nor has the economy being in free-fall seemed to have done it, nor the religious repression that led to the 2022 hijab protests or the humiliating loss in the war with Israel this June.
In each case, the regime has seen off the threat not by solving the problems that created it, but by violence and repression. The problems remain but so does the regime.
Now, the country and its rulers are contending with an environmental crisis so severe that it is almost certain to lead to economic and social upheaval too intense to be easily contained by the default policy of shooting and jailing. It’s just possible that Iran will make history as the first case of climate change leading to regime change.
At the heart of the crisis is a drought that has continued unabated for five years, with rainfall down nearly 40 percent from its long-term average. The protracted drought has dried out lakes and rivers and accelerated the depletion of groundwater reserves, which were already being over-exploited . Lake Urmia, the biggest in the Middle East, has lost three quarters of its water and may completely dry up this year. The effects of the drought have been exacerbated this summer by the tsunami-scale heat wave, which has further depleted water supplies while increasing demand for water.
If you are an Iranian who makes your living from agriculture, or lives in an outlying province neglected by the central government, the effects of the drought have been impacting life for some time. In many parts of the country, the deep-water wells sunk in a desperate search for water today yield nothing but dust. With groundwater disappearing, the land is literally sinking. Crops are failing, and villages have been abandoned. Periodically, anger and frustration have been reaching the point that people take to the streets.
This summer, however, Tehran is also feeling the effects, and politically speaking, that poses a far greater danger than drought in faraway and neglected places like Baluchistan. Amid stark shrinkage in two of Tehran’s key water reservoirs, the city water company last month reduced pressure so much that water can no longer reach beyond the second floor of apartment buildings. Families that can afford it rely on private water tanks; others do buckets.
“In Tehran, if we cannot manage and people do not cooperate in controlling consumption, there won’t be any water in dams by September or October,” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian warned. Pezeshkian rescinded a government plan to declare Wednesdays a holiday to save water, admitting it was a Band-aid solution, and ordered his own adhesive-strip in the form of 12-hour cuts in water supply for households with especially high consumption rates.
Droughts come and go, but in this case, the drought may not go so quickly or easily. That is because climate change has played a role, and climate change is here to stay.
Iran is already hot and dry and among the most vulnerable countries in the Middle East to climate change. Iran’s average temperature has increased by 2 degrees Celsius since the 1960s. In the coming decades, its mean temperature is forecast to rise another 2.6 degrees and precipitation to decline by 35 percent.
Could the government do something to reverse, or at least mitigate, any of this?
The water mafia
Around the world, the record even among the handful of best-intentioned governments is at best spotty and hasn’t come close to meeting the targets that would stabilize rising temperatures. In Iran, the outlook is even more hopeless: The regime not only ignored years of warning signs of impending environmental disaster, it has been the single biggest contributor to it.
In Iran (and of course not only there), powerful interests are committed to effectively destroying the environment and won’t stand down without a fight.
Much like its more famous and infamous nuclear program, Tehran takes great pride in the vast number of dams it has built over the years. But the dams and other giant water-transfer projects have wreaked massive environmental destruction, destroying the quality of river water, emptying aquifers, draining lakes and drying out wetlands.
None of this of any concern to Iran’s “water mafia,” a network of regime insiders many connected with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, that continues building the dams anyhow. That’s not because they make economic sense, but because these giant undertakings are an easy way to line their pockets with corrupt profits without fear of outside scrutiny.
The Upper Gotvand Dam, which was completed in 2012, captures all the poisonous dynamics. Fundamentally flawed from an engineering point of view because it was built on top of salt domes, the cost of building it more than doubled without explanation over the life of the project to $3.3 billion. When it was completed, the dam ended up increasing the salinity of the Karun River to the point that its water is no longer potable or useful for agriculture. Destroying the dam or removing the salt from the water is too costly, so the dam and the damage remain.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has hooked on to the environmental crisis as the newest item on his regime change de jour menu. In a video last week addressed to the Iranian people, he said, “In this brutal summer heat, you don’t even have clean, cold water to give your children …. Such disdain for the Iranian people. To live like this is not fair to you. It’s not fair to your children.”
“The moment your country is free, Israel’s top water experts will flood into every Iranian city bringing cutting-edge technology and know-how,” Netanyahu added.
His message is unlikely to play a role in fomenting revolution in Iran. But futurologists have warned that all over the world climate change will lead to mass migration, wars and other kinds of competition over resources, and political upheaval. Given the severity of its problem already and government incompetence/resistance to coping with it, Iran seems like as good a candidate as any for regime change happen sooner rather than later.
Imagining how this might play out is speculative. Possibly mass protests will break out again, but a more likely scenario is the government losing effective control of the country amid mass migration and civil disorder, not against the regime but in competition for water, electric power and other necessities. If so, the regime’s standard toolbox of repressive measures may not work, and Iran will become a failed state.
In these troubling times, Israelis can take some small comfort in knowing that in contrast to Iran, we solved our water crisis by becoming a world leader on water conservation and desalination. Iran could learn a thing or two one day, although given the politics that day is far off, and maybe too far off to make a difference.
But that one problem solved still leaves us facing the much bigger threat of climate change.
Like Iran, Israel is also destined to feel the brunt of global warming, with the Israel Meteorological Service warning last month that the country could see heatwaves reaching 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) or more in many regions by 2100. It predicts more sudden, heavy downpours that could trigger floods from higher rainfall intensity even as rainfall overall decreases.
Politically, technologically and economically, Israel should be better able than Iran to cope with these immense challenges, but no one should imagine they will be able to be addressed by fixes like desalination. The real solution, of course, is to reverse or at least delay rising temperatures, but it seems like the rest of the world is much like Iran, seeing all the warning signs right in front of it and looking the other way.