Name: Why Iran is Rapidly Dying
Uploaded: 2025-11-19T17:26:50.000Z
Duration: 39 min 5 s
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Iran as a nation is arguably facing its greatest civilizational crisis that it has seen in centuries.

Now, geopolitically speaking, Tehran has suffered continuous setback after setback over the last couple of years.

In its decades long confrontation with Israel, the Islamic Republic's top declared enemy.

Its overseas proxies that it has spent billions of dollars and decades of time building up an arming like Hezbollah, Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the Assad regime in Syria have all been either effectively crippled or completely destroyed.

And exposing the Iranian heartland to direct hostile foreign attacks for the first time in decades.

and Israeli warplanes were subsequently able to relentlessly bombard the country's sensitive military and nuclear research sites with impunity.

An American mediated peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan simultaneously threatens to establish a continuous corridor of NATO Turkish influence across Iran's northern border in the South Caucasus, blocking off Iran from being able to maintain a direct land corridor with their ally Russia.

While growing instability in the east with a wild Taliban regime in Afghanistan is resulting in unpredictable violent border skirmishes after the government accused its Afghan population of collective disloyalty and spying for Israel during the war, and

Tehran's decision to begin forcefully deporting millions of undocumented Afghans from the country across the border after the government accused its Afghan population of collective disloyalty and spying for Israel during the war.

And yet, despite all of these enormous ongoing external crises, Iran's greatest contemporary problem that threatens its entire existence is not geopolitical, but

Because in just a short amount of time, Iran might very well become the very first major society in the modern world to legitimately begin running out of water for its own people.

And because Iran is such a huge country with more than 92 million people, that's not just a huge problem for Iran, but

a huge problem for the entire rest of the world as well.

The situation has gotten so bad that it is now acutely visible even within the capital and the seat of the government's power in Tehran, which is also Iran's largest city.

Roughly 10 million people live within the city limits of TEHRAN Today, about 11% of the country's total nationwide population.

And yet Tehran now consumes roughly a quarter of all of Iran's water supplies.

70% of Tehran's water supply is usually provided by a series of nearby dams and their reservoirs at Amir Kebir, Lar Mamlu and La Tian.

But as of September of 2025, all four of their reservoirs are at critical and unprecedentedly low levels.

The usual level of annual rainfall that Tehran experiences is about 260 millimeters.

But in 2024, the capital only experienced a fraction of this at 140 millimeters, while preliminary estimates for 2025 suggest an even more catastrophic level of rainfall at just 100 millimeters.

With that in mind, these reservoirs around Tehran combined typically hold a long term average of 618 million cubic meters of water within them.

But in 2024, they had dwindled down to just 485 million cubic meters remaining.

And as of September 2025, they've withered away even further to just 258 million cubic meters of water remaining, meaning that half of Tehran's stored water reserves disappeared in just a single year.

Even worse, the La Tian Dam reservoir in particular, which usually holds about 95 million cubic meters of water, has shrunk by more than 90% and now contains just about 9 million cubic meters still remaining.

The underground aquifers beneath the city have also begun collapsing and running dry after decades of chronic overuse, resulting in a rapidly accelerating rate of subsidence that has been seeing Tehran sinking into the ground beneath it by several millimeters a year, recently threatening the capital's infrastructure and buildings.

Over the summer of 2025, the water crisis got so bad that the Iranian government was forced to just completely cut the taps in the capitol for half a day as the temperature soared to more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, resulting in high energy demand from air conditioners on the city's grid that resulted in power cuts and rolling blackouts on top of the water cuts months beforehand.

In late 2024, the Iranian government was already demanding that offices, schools and even banks in the capital all had to be shut down on particularly bad weather days in order to conserve power.

While officials were cautioning that if nothing was done to ration their energy, Tehran could become forced to adopt a four day work week during the summer when demand on the grid was particularly intense.

The government has already started rationing the water supply in the capital by cutting off households water supply for three to six hours a day.

And in some cases the water pressure has gotten so low that it now fails to reach some high rises in the city, forcing their residents to carry bottled water or buckets up to their apartments for all of their water needs.

Instead, the crisis has gotten so bad in Tehran that questions have even been raised about the city's long term habitability, while the government has even announced that it's currently investigating relocating the capital away from Tehran to somewhere else that doesn't have as many Water and infrastructure related issues.

Iran's current sitting president, Massoud Pezeshkian, has publicly stated that he has proposed relocating the country's capital further away to the south, somewhere near to the Persian Gulf, in order to be closer to strategic trade routes in the area.

But the problem is that the water crisis is not just a problem that's unique to Tehran.

It is a problem that is facing the entire country from north to south and from east to west.

Everywhere across the country, reservoirs are running dry and lakes are disappearing.

The Iranian regime's own news agency, IRNA, reported in early October of 2025 that 19 of the country's largest reservoirs are currently on the verge of complete dryness and that three of them, left unnamed in the report have already hit 00% remaining capacity.

More than half of the dams across the country now hold less than 40% of their overall capacity.

Lake Urmia, once the largest lake in the entire Middle east that was in northwestern Iran, has nearly completely dried up, leaving behind nothing but a salty, dusty crust.

More than 280 cities across the country now face extreme water stress, like the city of Yazz, whose water supply ran out entirely as recently as March of 2025, which led to the city having to be entirely supplied by water tankers and bottled water for nearly a week until the taps could be restored.

Rural communities across the country have been even more badly struck as hundreds of villages now rely completely on tanker trucks after their wells have run dry.

Cities across the country are literally sinking as their underground aquifers have been completely, completely depleted, while cracks are forming in rail lines connecting the country's major cities.

Together, some Iranian officials have even warned about a looming day zero in Tehran and in other cities across the country, the day when the taps for millions of people may run dry completely.

It has gotten so bad that it has started to become exploitable by hostile foreign actors.

Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was released a video in August of 2025 that directly encouraged the Iranian people to rise up and revolt against their conditions.

He said at the time, Iran's thirst for water is only matched by its thirst for freedom.

Once Iran is free, Israel's top water experts will come to every city in the country with the most advanced technologies and knowledge to help Iran with water recycling and desalination.

Even though Netanyahu was the absolutely wrong man to make such a pitch to the Iranian people, he wasn't wrong about the fact that the water crisis has become the Iranian government's greatest strategic vulnerability.

It is exacerbating the country's complicated ethnic fault lines as minority groups accused the regime of prioritizing water access for the Persian majority.

And it is all a complicated story of government corruption and graft, terrible policies, clean climate change and geopolitical developments and intrigue that have led Iran to the brink of water bankruptcy today.

And to understand how the country got here, we have to go back in time to the late 1940s, when Iran was still ruled as an absolute monarchy by the Shah.

In 1949, the Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, took a visit to the city of Las Vegas in the United States.

He was there on official business to observe the marvel of the Hoover Dam that the Americans had constructed across the Colorado river, which created a vast reservoir behind it in Lake Mead that enabled the desert metropolis of Las Vegas to survive and to thrive.

The Shah was interested in modernizing his own country, and

building monumental dams and reservoirs in the similarly arid Iranian climate was of a very deep interest to him.

He returned back to Iran from the Mojave Desert with a new ambition and with technical assistance and engineers that were provided to him by the Truman administration, who brought modern irrigation and drilling technologies that enabled Iran's farmers to begin draining their ancient aquifers at an unsustainable rate.

Iran as a country has a very uneven distribution of water resources found across the country.

Across a strip of land in the north of Iran near the Caspian Sea, the annual rainfall levels are high and average about 1,280 millimeters per year, similar to the levels that are seen in wet environments like New York City, which makes this whole area a lush, dense green forest that looks nothing like most westerners.

Popular perception of Iran but across the central plateau of Iran, that's the heartland of the Persian people, and

across the southern lowlands, annual rainfall will rarely ever exceed more than 100 millimeters.

The rainy season across these other parts of Iran usually only lasts between October and March, and

that'll leave the land extremely dry for most of the rest of the year.

In some places, the entire year's worth of rainfall might fall during sudden torrential storms that last only a few days.

As a result, the Shah and his engineers wanted to modernize Iran and redistribute the availability of water throughout the country by diversions and dams to regulate water flows.

But he also ordered the establishment of water hungry industries like petrochemical and steel plants to be constructed in the drier parts of the country.

Within the central plateau, in the Persian majority region, at places like Isfahan and Fars, which tied the fate of Iran's heavy industries to geographic areas that lacked meaningful water supplies of their own and were over reliant on diversions of water from other parts of the country.

Later, in the early 1960s, the Shah implemented a series of land reforms in the country that redistributed Iran's large feudal agricultural estates to smaller farmers and families that promoted their adoption of mechanized farming with state incentives.

Millions of Iranian peasants were granted new land to farm with their new mechanized equipment.

But it also led to a breakdown in Iran's traditional system of irrigation that had lasted for thousands of years before it that were called Khanate.

Khanuts are effectively underground aqueducts that the Persians had perfected over millennia to transport water across the arid and hot central plateau.

But these khanates that had supplied Iranian cities with water for countless generations began to be steadily abandoned in the early 1960s as the new peasant farmers began switching over to motorized deep wells en masse in order to access the country's below ground aquifers, which had only limited supplies of water that takes thousands of years to naturally replenish and recharge.

The process of abandoning the country's traditional water management system in exchange for new and misunderstood technologies had already begun.

But it would dramatically skyrocket to wildly unsustainable levels after the Islamic Revolution overthrew the Shah in 1979 and established the modern theocratic Islamic Republic in its place.

After radical Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took 66Americans as hostages, diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States collapsed and the US initiated a trade embargo against Iran that has continued for decades ever since, restricting the country's access to the mechanized equipment and parts that it came to rely upon for its agriculture and irrigation beforehand.

During the Shah era and at almost the exact same time, Iraq launched a full scale invasion of Iran in 1980 that sparked a decade devastating, eight year long Iran Iraq War which led to the introduction of food and resource rationing in Iran.

As the theocracy's first supreme leader, the Ayatollah Rufollah Khomeini began advocating for a policy of radical self sufficiency and food sovereignty in a world that appeared overwhelmingly hostile to his new regime, he began ordering a radical expansion in Iran's dams, wells and agricultural infrastructure, all in the name of this self sufficiency.

Before the 1979 revolution, there were fewer than 80,000 wells across the country.

But within just three years after the rise to power of the Ayatollahs that number would more than double while hundreds of new dams were being actively planned as well.

Most of them concentrated across the arid central plateau region.

After the long war with Iraq came to an inconclusive end in 1988, the regime's personal army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or the irgc was suddenly left without a clear military purp.

And so the government under then President Akbar Hashemi Rasvanjani adopted a new purpose for the IRGC that they called the Reconstruction Jihad.

Adapting the IRGC to construction and development.

In order to maintain their influence and morale.

A new engineering firm run by the IRGC was established that was called the Katam Al Anibia Construction Company which quickly became the regime's go to contractor for building dams, tunnels and other water transfer projects.

Another company called the Iran Water and Power Resources Development Company or the IWPCo was also founded as a state owned design firm by regime insiders.

While an incredibly powerful and opaque consulting and lobbying firm also run by regime insiders was founded called Mahab Go.

All three of these companies were effectively run by the exact same people with close ties to the regime and they collectively formed a closed loop with no external checks and balances.

The IWPCO company would design and commission dam projects that were usually based on old outdated Western blueprints and rarely ever considered any environmental studies.

The Mahab Gods company would then lobby the government for their approval and then the Katam Al Anibia Company would be immediately awarded the no bid contracts to actually build the projects and was shielded from any political oversight.

This network of IRGC and regime operated firms and companies that all worked together in tandem eventually came to be called the country's Water mafia.

And the rapid expansion of dam and water projects came to be seen as avenues for enriching themselves rather than benefiting the country.

Over the next few decades, the water mafia constructed hundreds of dams all across the country, usually without any environmental assessments or any long term planning at all.

Water from rivers were diverted by the water mafia to feed IRGC owned factories, plants and heavy industries at the expense of agricultural and municipal supplies to further enrich themselves.

Some of the most infamous water megaprojects that the Islamic Republic carried out following the war with Iraq include the 550,000 hectare project that began in 1996 in the Western provinces of Kujistan and Elam.

Enormous amounts of land were confiscated by the government and the Karun river was diverted to feed industrial farms controlled by regime linked insiders.

A mega dam along the Karun river called the Gotvand Dam was completed in 2011, despite ignored warnings by environmentalists that there would be enormous salt formation at the site if it went ahead as predicted.