Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian announced that the country had “no choice” but to change its capital due to a catastrophic drought.
An increasingly apocalyptic water crisis has gripped Iran, as unsustainable water management practices have begun to catch up to Tehran. Tens of millions have been affected, particularly the 14 million residents of Tehran’s metropolitan area. After months of pessimistic rhetoric, Pezeshkian announced on Thursday that Iran now had to move its capital, stripped of all other options.
“When we said we must move the capital, we did not even have enough budget. If we had, maybe it would have been done. The reality is that we no longer have a choice; it is an obligation,” Pezeshkian said in a speech in the province of Qazvin, Iran International reported, referencing previous suggestions to move the capital.
He warned that Tehran now faces “catastrophe,” with the depletion of groundwater causing the land to sink by as much as 30 centimeters, just shy of 12 inches, per year in some areas. Further mismanagement, construction in upstream areas, and cuts to downstream flows would risk further irreversible damage.
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The president ended on a morbid note, saying “a dark future” awaits if drastic action isn’t taken.
“Protecting the environment is not a joke,” he said. “Ignoring it means signing our own destruction.”
Pezeshkian warned earlier in the month that water rationing would have to be implemented, followed by more drastic moves, if rainfall didn’t come by late November.
“If it doesn’t rain in Tehran by late November, we’ll have to ration water. And if it still doesn’t rain, we’ll have to evacuate Tehran,” he was cited as saying by the SNN.ir semi-official news agency.
The exact location of the new capital is up in the air. Isfahan, a historical city of great prominence in previous eras — serving as the capital of the Seljuk and Safavid Empires — has been ruled out due to similar water problems.
In January, government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said a new capital would be located in the southern coastal region of Makran.
The idea of moving Iran’s capital has been floated for decades, though first seriously proposed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 2009. These proposals became more urgent starting last year when the full extent of the water crisis became evident. Pezeshkian began making more concrete proposals this year, though often couched with the sentiment that the situation could change. His latest comments may be his most definite yet in pushing the relocation of the capital.
The relocation would entail the construction of an entirely new metropolis, presumably along with much of Tehran’s population. The move would entail one of the largest population transfers of modern times, and one of the greatest logistical feats of the 21st century, in a country embroiled in a major economic crisis. The vague outlines of the plan leave countless questions unanswered, particularly how the impoverished country would deal with the suspension of a quarter of its GDP and uprooting of a fifth of its population.
The construction of a new capital would also take a long amount of time, time Tehran doesn’t have, especially as Makran is one of the most underdeveloped provinces in Iran. It boasts just about 1.5% of Iran’s GDP.
Makran has its own water crisis, along with the rest of the country.
The consensus among analysis is that the current water crisis in Iran is the result of mismanagement and corruption. The network of ministers, deputy ministers, and the heads of major government-linked construction firms is widely known within Iran as the “water mafia,” operating under Iran’s Supreme Water Council.
The water mafia has depleted the country’s water supplies through inefficient agricultural expansion, ecologically damaging megaprojects, and redirecting water towards water-intensive industries and other efforts. The expansion of Tehran has also proven disastrous, with asphalt and concrete sealing the Alborz foothill alluvial fans, preventing rain, runoff, and snowmelt from refilling Tehran’s aquifers.
Aged infrastructure has also worsened the situation — a report in Foreign Policy cited insiders speaking off the record in claiming that 35% of Tehran’s water disappears through leaky pipes.
The water mafia’s redirection of water toward corrupt ventures has forced farmers across the country to overpump groundwater, depleting the country’s aquifers. Farms across the country have been destroyed after this unsustainable use, pushing more people to Tehran.
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Worse yet, the depletion of aquifers has led to a phenomenon known as land subsidence, where the land itself begins to sink. This problem is particularly deadly in Tehran, where the sinking land has damaged the foundations of buildings and threatened mass casualties if, or when, a long-awaited earthquake occurs.
The water crisis is existential for Iran’s Islamic government, fomenting social discontent at a time it can least afford it.