Iran is not merely on the verge of revolution; it is confronting a broader systemic collapse. The regime in Iran faces an escalating conflict with Israel and the United States. Yet the crisis extends far beyond external tensions. Domestically, public discontent has been building for years.
In January 2026, millions of people took to the streets, chanting for change in the political system and calling for Iranian Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi to lead that change. However, they were met with brutal repression, and tens of thousands were killed. The roots of these protests are diverse: the absence of political freedoms, deep-seated economic corruption, an aggressive foreign policy, and, critically, the long-term depletion of Iran’s water resources.
In this note, we argue that, beyond political and economic challenges, regime change and a transition to democratic governance are necessary to mitigate Iran’s chronic water crisis. We believe Iran’s water crisis, along with its consequences for the country’s sustainability and that of the broader Middle East, will continue to worsen as long as the current regime remains in power. Yet, the longer this political status quo lasts, the more difficult the recovery will become.
Root causes of the chronic water crisis
Environmental catastrophe is looming and increasingly widespread across the country: Lake Urmia, once the largest inland lake in Iran, has largely turned into a salt flat, wells have dried up, and dust storms sweep across fields. Iran is “water bankrupt,” i.e., the country consumes far more than nature and man-made infrastructures can replenish. These scenes reveal how ideologically driven policies have pushed Iran toward ecological collapse.
Iran is the only country that ranks in the global top five for the majority of land subsidence indices, mainly due to aggressive groundwater extraction; its cumulative groundwater deficit is estimated at 150 to 250 billion cubic meters. By comparison, the plan to revive the dried-up Lake Urmia sought to retain about 15 billion cubic meters in the lake. In other words, under the current policies, Iran has lost from its groundwater reserves alone more than 10 times the volume of Lake Urmia. Yet, because this crisis unfolds deep underground and largely out of sight, it attracts far less public attention.
Besides that, Iran is one of the few countries to consume effectively 100% of its annual renewable water resources and has a soil erosion rate that is five times the global average, partly due to extensive water extraction. Together, these indicators point to the steady degradation of the country’s natural resources.
This was not inevitable. Prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran became the first country in the Middle East to establish an environmental protection agency and imposed restrictions on groundwater extraction in many plains. There was a basic recognition that aquifers are finite and that some areas required strict protection.
However, the Islamic Republic scrapped those safeguards. A 1983 “fair water distribution” law allowed pumping from previously banned aquifers and concentrated water authority in the Ministry of Energy. In contrast to the pre-Islamic Revolution era and to many countries today (e.g., the U.S.), where responsibility for permitting, enforcement, and oversight of water-related projects is divided among separate institutions, the Islamic Republic has consolidated these functions within the Ministry of Energy. This concentration of authority has created conditions that inherently have enabled widespread corruption.
Ideology also compounded the harm. Although Iran is a semi-arid country, the constitution of the Islamic Republic mandates self‑sufficiency in food, and Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, claimed Iran had abundant land and water for agricultural purposes. In reality, both are scarce: more than half of Iran’s current farming occurs on land considered unsuitable for agriculture, while less than 3% of the country receives more than 500 milliliters of annual precipitation. And yet today, the Seventh National Development Plan (2024-2028) doubles down on this approach by explicitly targeting 90% self-sufficiency in key staple crops. The result has been an unsustainable strategy that treats every river as a potential reservoir and every aquifer as a bottomless bank account.
The consequences of the aforementioned policies have been staggering. Over‑pumping has caused widespread land subsidence; more than 500 plains suffer groundwater collapse. Hundreds of villages lack safe drinking water, forcing residents to migrate to urban peripheries, where they strain already fragile services and heighten tensions. We warn that the crisis now poses a growing threat to social stability and national security.
Overall, Iran’s water governance is primarily to blame. However, this failure goes beyond poor management or misguided decisions; it reflects a deliberate governing approach, coupled with corruption, that has repeatedly prioritized ideology over scientific evidence, environmental limits, and the country’s actual water capacity.
The regime’s top‑down system leaves little room for public engagement, and officials react only when protests erupt; this governance model has enabled unchecked dam construction, inter-basin water transfers, and increasingly aggressive exploitation of water resources. Water responsibilities are scattered among the Energy Ministry, the Environmental Protection Organization, the Ministry of Agricultural Jihad, and military‑linked conglomerates, each pursuing conflicting agendas.
Climate change could also intensify the damage. Iran is among the world’s most climate‑vulnerable countries. Temperatures are rising, snowpack is shrinking, and droughts are lengthening. However, climate change is not the main cause; it acts as a catalyst, not a cause, for intensifying the water bankruptcy situation in Iran.
Agriculture consumes approximately 90% of Iran’s water at very low productivity levels, yet contributes only a modest share to the economy, at the cost of soil degradation and aquifer depletion. While agriculture employs about 15% of the workforce, Iran must reduce irrigated land, improve agricultural efficiency, reduce production and exports of water-intensive crops with imports, and shift labor toward other sectors. Yet sanctions, capital flight, and restrictive social policies have constrained tourism, industry, and the service sectors, reinforcing the state’s reliance on water-intensive activities to sustain an increasingly unsustainable rural economy. Without economic diversification, Iran cannot ease pressure on its aquifers.
Final remarks
As Iranian specialists in water resources, environmental engineering, and agricultural engineering, we are profoundly concerned about the sustainability of the country we love. Based on the arguments outlined above, we believe that Iran’s water bankruptcy is rooted in the political and economic order of the Islamic Republic and that only a systemic change can avert catastrophe.
We argue that a systematic transition toward a democratic, nonideological, and economically diversified governance model — where institutions responsible for water management operate without deep conflicts of interest and are insulated from politically connected military organizations — is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for addressing Iran’s water bankruptcy.
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Without such a systematic transition, and based on the above discussion, the degradation of Iran’s water resources is likely to persist. Given the constitutional framework and ideological identity of the Islamic Republic, the primary prerequisite for this transition is a fundamental transformation of the political system — namely, regime change. This would not, by itself, guarantee the restoration of Iran’s water resources, particularly in the short term, and some of the damage may already be irreversible. It is, however, a necessary first step toward rebuilding effective governance and safeguarding the country’s vital water resources.
A political transition is not only a necessity but also a moral and strategic imperative for safeguarding Iran’s water security and the well-being of future generations.
Mehdi Ketabchy (@MehdiKetabchy), PhD, PE, CFM, ENV SP, is a water resources consultant in the private sector. Mohammad Nayeb Yazdi (@Mnyazdi), PhD, PMP, is a project manager with a local government agency in Virginia. Ali Mehran (@amehranx), PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at San Jose State University, specializing in hydrology, water resources management, remote sensing, and geospatial data science. Amir Verdi (@UCRWater), PhD, is an associate professor of agricultural and urban water management in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of California, Riverside. Mohsen B. Mesgaran (@MBMesgaran), PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis.