Supply failures are dramatic example of way climate crisis threatens basic human needs – and with it political stability
Gripped by a terrible drought now entering its sixth year, Iran’s cities are on the brink of what its meteorological organisation calls “water day zero”: the boundary beyond which supply systems no longer function. This was crossed by Chennai in India in summer 2019 and is now threatening Mashhad, Tabriz and Tehran, where taps in the city’s southern districts had already run dry by early December.
Nightly “pressure cuts”, in which the water supply is halted to whole districts in the capital, have become the norm. Protesters demanding “Water, electricity, life – our basic right” over the summer were already risking a clampdown.
According to the Middle East expert Juan Cole, the head of the regional water company reported in early November that the five main water supply dams to Tehran, the capital, were only 11% full, and criticised the government for its inaction.
Tehran, home to 10 million people, has been threatened with the most drastic measure of all – evacuation. “If it does not rain in Tehran by December we should ration water; if it still does not rain, we must empty Tehran,” the country’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said back in November.
The Shah of Iran and the Islamic Republic have overseen the abandonment of Iran’s ancient qanat underground aquifer system. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images
When the biggest demonstrations in Iran in years erupted a few weeks later, followed by a brutal government crackdown, the fundamental insecurity induced by a lack of water was a crucial – but under-reported – background to the upheavals that may yet topple the 47-year-old Islamic Republic itself.
The immediate causes of the protests were a combination of worsening government austerity and a dramatic currency crisis, the falling value of the rial pushing domestic inflation up even beyond the 40% it had reached earlier in the year. But that shock has to be understood as the final break after decades of cumulative failure.
For Iran, the evidence strongly suggests that climate breakdown is the deep cause of its water shortages: average temperatures in its cities between 1990 and 2022 have risen about twice as fast as the global rate, according to research from Iran referenced by Cole.
The impact of those rising temperatures has been amplified by the mismanagement of Iran’s water supplies, in a decades-long failure under successive governments that long predates the 1979 revolution.
Spurred on by visions of national modernisation and self-reliance, both the Shah of Iran and the Islamic Republic have overseen the “abandonment” of Iran’s ancient qanat aquifer system. Consisting of about 70,000 tunnels dug into hillsides across the country to access underground water, most of Iran’s 250,000 miles of qanat tunnels are about 2,500 years old – supplying its cities and agriculture with fresh water for millennia.
Iran instead became one of the top three dam builders in the world over the second half of the 20th century. From 1962, under the shah, 58 dams were constructed, holding around a quarter of the country’s total water resource, with the primary aim of increasing its agricultural output.
But by putting major dams on rivers too small to sustain them, the authorities brought short-term relief at the cost of longer-term water loss: evaporation from reservoirs increased while upland areas were deprived of water, now trapped behind the dams. After the revolution, and the overthrow of the shah, the attempted shift to economic self-sufficiency saw efforts to maximise domestic water extraction, primarily through the increased use of groundwater pumps, with no serious attention paid to sustainability.
There is a critical international dimension to the shortages. Long-delayed by the country’s insurgency, Afghanistan’s Taliban regime finally oversaw the completion of the Pashdan Dam on the Harirud River, where construction had originally begun in 2011. The Harirud flows from Afghanistan into eastern Iran, but the operation of the dam places the Taliban in control of 80% of the flow down the river, meaning they could decide the water supplies to major cities including Mashhad, Iran’s second largest.
Iranian women pray for rain in Tehran in November 2025. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Armed clashes between Iran and Afghanistan broke out over access to the Helmand River in summer 2023, with casualties on both sides before a negotiated truce. The Harirud, unlike the Helmand, notionally governed by a 1973 treaty, has no formal agreement over water use in place, and rhetoric over access to it has ratcheted up over the past year and more as the dam approached completion.
Meanwhile, Iran’s groundwater supplies have been squeezed almost dry over the past 40 years. More than 1m groundwater pumps have been installed, 90% for use by Iran’s agricultural sector, particularly when surface conditions have been arid. The ancient qanat system has been pumped dry, with most of the tunnels falling into disrepair – causing severe subsidence in Isfahan, a city that once relied on the tunnel system for its water. The result is a disastrous depletion of Iran’s slow-replenishing underground water supplies, with most pumped dry over the first two decades of this century.
Faced with soaring inflation, costly sanctions, and the hefty costs of administering a complex system of “preferential exchange rate” subsidies for imported essentials, rising to $18bn over the last year, Iran’s rulers have attempted some familiar versions of “reform”, including dramatic spending cuts.
It was pressure on government finances that pushed it to try to end the preferential exchange rate system in early December, along with concern the system had become thoroughly corrupt, with relatively few well-connected importers enjoying massive benefits that most consumers never saw. The intention was to replace this subsidy for importers by boosting the existing system of direct payments, which is almost a form of basic income, starting from March next year.
The Amir-Kabir dam running at low capacity. By putting major dams on rivers too small to sustain them, Iran’s authorities brought short-term relief at the cost of longer-term water loss. Photograph: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA
But ending the preferential rates system threatened to raise the domestic prices of essentials, including food imports, further increasing inflation, which was already running at over 40%, and 72% for food.
Inflation is one version of the chronic scarcity that is making daily life in Iran unbearable. Water shortages, where basic systems do not work and access to water becomes a privilege for those who can afford bottled supplies, is another.
In a world without climate breakdown, Iran’s decades of water mismanagement may not have mattered quite so intensely. But coupled with the grinding impact of sanctions, the entire system has been tipped into what could be a terminal crisis.
We should expect more such climate unrest. One study from scientists at Pusan National University, South Korea, published at the end of 2025, forecasts that three-quarters of the world’s most drought-prone regions will be at risk of “day zero” by the end of the century, and a third of them will be hit before 2030. The failure of Iran’s water supplies is only the most dramatic example we have to date of how the climate crisis is threatening our most essential systems – and with them, political stability. It is unlikely to be the last.
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