TEHRAN, Iran — A drastic new message adorns the walls of the Iranian capital, usually reserved for war heroes and weapons.
“There is a water shortage!” reads the government poster's slogan, inside a water container that is nearly empty. “It’s fall and there is still no rain.”
That’s not news to Erfan Ensani, 39, who returned home from a long day working in the textile section of the city’s central bazaar last week to find his taps running dry.
Iran is facing its worst water crisis in decades. With no end in sight and authorities warning they may even have to evacuate the capital of 10 million people, residents like Ensani are scrambling to respond.
“We didn’t have water for three days. The pressure was so low that nothing came out,” Ensani, who, like many residents, works two jobs to make ends meet, told NBC News in a recent interview in Tehran.
“The water company says we should buy pumps to solve the problem and also get a storage tank to keep some water. But that’s expensive, especially now when the economy is bad,” Ensani said.
People shop for water storage tanks following a drought crisis in Tehran on Monday.Majid Asgaripour / WANA via Reuters
Everyone in his building is fed up, Ensani said, with some neighbors even traveling across the city to their relatives’ houses just to take a shower. Families with kids have an even more difficult time. “These are extra costs that people just can’t handle right now,” Ensani said.
President Masoud Pezeshkian said two weeks ago that extreme measures may need to be taken if there is no rain by late November.
“Even if we ration, if it doesn’t rain again, then we won’t have water at all,” he said, according to a video posted on the website of the semiofficial Tabnak news agency.
“They’ll have to evacuate Tehran.”
'A state of failure'
Tehran is now in its sixth year of drought, while temperatures that exceeded 122 degrees Fahrenheit over the summer led to power outages and an enforced public holiday.
The reservoirs that the capital depends on for water are now at only 5% of their reserve capacity, Mohsen Ardakani, the head of the Tehran Province Water and Wastewater Company, said two weeks ago, according to the semiofficial Mehr News Agency.
Iran’s 12-day war with Israel last summer also damaged water infrastructure, which has exacerbated the problem, according to Energy Minister Abbas Aliabadi, who warned two weeks ago that the government may have to resort to cutting water off completely on some nights to deal with the crisis.
The semiofficial Tasnim News Agency reported two weeks ago that water restrictions in Tehran had already begun.
Aliabadi said this week that Iran was using cloud-seeding technology in the hope of boosting rainfall, though it requires existing clouds to work.
A cloud-seeding flight was conducted in the Lake Urmia basin on Saturday, Mohammadmahdi Javadianzadeh, Head of the Organization for Development of Atmospheric Water Technologies, said.
Combination satellite images reveal variations in the water level of the Latian Dam, in northern Iran, on June 20 and Nov. 3.
Part of the reason the Iranian government is so concerned is that a water crisis can build into a political grievance and fuel unrest.
Videos posted on social media and verified by NBC News showed students protesting water shortages at Tehran’s Al-Zahra University last weekend.
The issue has sometimes led to violence and arrests in the southwestern Khuzestan province, home to a large Arab minority that has long complained of neglect by the central government.
This time, many Iranians blame the state.
“The authorities have known about this problem for years, but nothing has been done,” Sadegh Razavi, a Tehran restaurant owner, said. “In a country as rich in resources as ours, it’s sad that we have no electricity in the summer and now a water crisis, too.”
The prolonged drought along with years of overconsumption, an inefficient agricultural sector and mismanagement — including decades building mega-dams of questionable utility — have led to the problem, analysts say.
“I don’t call it a crisis anymore. This is a state of failure. That’s why for years I’ve referred to it as water bankruptcy,” said Kaveh Madani, the director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health.
“A crisis is a state that you can mitigate, you can go back to normal at some point if you put forces together. But the damages we are seeing to the ecosystem, to the nature and even to many parts of the economy and infrastructure are irreversible.”
A 'no-brainer' crisis
The current situation was not a surprise to researchers based in North America who studied Iran’s water supply and the strains on it.
“It was a no-brainer,” said Ali Nazemi, an associate professor at Concordia University in Montreal.
In a 2021 study in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports, Nazemi and other researchers warned that the Islamic Republic was overdrafting groundwater in nearly four-fifths of the landscape, which was causing Iran’s land to sink, its soil to grow more salty and its salt lakes to disappear.
The researchers, who dedicated the paper “to the people of Iran,” warned that a crisis was brewing that had the potential for “irreversible impacts on land and environment, threatening country’s water, food, socio-economic security.”
The researchers used publicly available data from Iran’s Ministry of Energy to assess the groundwater depletion. “After this paper was published, they took the data sets out of public access,” Nazemi said.
The receding waters of Latian Dam reveal a dry riverbed near Tehran, Iran, on Nov. 10. Bahram / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty images
Amir AghaKouchak, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine, said climate change has exacerbated the problem, but the biggest issue is how water use is governed.
“This narrative of climate change is responsible, to be honest, is not really accurate,” AghaKouchak said, adding that Iran has weathered drought throughout its history. “The problem is mismanagement and systemic corruption in the system that basically allows powerful organizations to even build dams or diversion tunnels without even getting permits.”
Nazemi said that dynamic is worsened by inefficient irrigation methods and aging urban water infrastructure that leaks.
There have been early warning signs.
Lake Urmia, which was once the sixth largest salt lake in the world, is desiccated and causing dust storms. Zayandeh Rud, the largest river in Iran’s central plateau, is no longer a permanent river.
But there is no quick fix to the problem, and government officials have begun proposing more drastic solutions.
Aliabadi, the energy minister, warned Wednesday that overconsumption of water will be punished, noting that he had a plan to cut electricity to households still filling their swimming pools.
“All the options are related to emergency management only,” Madani, of the United Nations University, said.
He added: “The most effective one is reduce consumption by the citizens. To get there, you need to earn their trust. You need to increase transparency in your system. Have a proper communication channel. This is very hard for a country that has gone through a war recently.”
Amin Khodadadi
Evan Bush is a science reporter for NBC News.
Babak Dehghanpisheh is an NBC News Digital international editor based in New York.
Colin Sheeley and Jiachuan Wu contributed.
