Iran is a warning to every society that treats water as infinite. Over the summer, Iran’s water crisis turned into an emergency. Wells collapsed and some reservoirs ran dry. Taps went dry for half a day in Tehran, and state media warned that the city of about 10 million people could hit “Day Zero,” the point at which water resources can no longer meet demand, within weeks.[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Temperatures rose above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, air conditioners droned, and power cuts followed. Millions of Iranians baked in the punishing heat. In a rare admission of failure, Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president offered 100 billion tomans (about a million dollars) to anyone who could solve the crisis.Iran isn’t facing a mere drought. Iran faces water bankruptcy, with demand far outstripping supply. The collapse of water security in Iran has been decades in the making and is rooted in a mania for megaprojects—dam building, deep wells, and water transfer schemes—that ignored the fundamentals of hydrology and ecological balance.For millennia, qanats—ingenious underground aqueducts—balanced survival with scarcity across the central plateau of Iran. Those traditional systems are now collapsing alongside aquifers, and ancient settlements in Yazd in central Iran, Kerman in southeast Iran, and Khorasan in northeastern Iran have been abandoned as qanats dried up, aquifers caved in, and land subsided. Satellite imagery and field surveys show entire farming communities disappearing because their groundwater sources failed.Successive Iranian rulers believed that dams, deep wells, and inter-basin transfers could outsmart geography and climate. The mismanagement of resources by the Islamic Republic compounded the crisis. Political hubris and mismanagement have reduced one of the oldest water civilizations to a parable of collapse.Origins of the water crisisThe environmental unraveling of Iran began with a fascination for concrete. In 1949, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, visited Las Vegas and marveled at the Hoover Dam. The Shah was enthralled by colossal structures as symbols of control.In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for influence in Asia and Africa, packing their ideological visions in the guise of development, and luring modernizing Asian and African leaders with loans and technical assistance in dam building and hydraulics.President Harry S. Truman’s Four Point Program offered the Shah technical assistance, sending American engineers to train Iranian specialists, transferring modern irrigation and drilling technology, and introducing deep well drilling equipment and powerful pumps that enabled Iranian farmers to drain aquifers at an unsustainable pace. The Shah placed water-hungry industries such as steel and petrochemicals in Iran’s driest central plateau in Isfahan and Fars provinces, tying development of heavy industry to regions with no water of their own and dependent on diversions from other basins.In 1963, the Shah introduced land reforms to modernize the countryside by redistributing large estates to small farmers, breaking up control of feudal landlords, and promoting mechanized farming with state credit. More than two million peasant families were given land. The reforms hastened the break with traditional systems. Many farmers abandoned the ancient qanats for motorized wells. But the Shah’s failure to provide support to the peasants led to their farms failing, and sent waves of impoverished migrants to Tehran and other Iranian cities—many of whom would later fuel the 1979 revolution.The age of the AyatollahsAfter the fall of the Shah in January 1979, the nascent Islamic Republic denounced his aggressive modernization drive inspired by the West. In November 1979, radical Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, demanding the Carter Administration extradite the Shah, who had been granted asylum in the United States. President Jimmy Carter froze Iranian government assets in the U.S. and imposed a trade embargo on the country.The Iran-Iraq war broke out in Sept.1980, and the Islamic Republic faced intense pressure to feed the people. Food rationing was introduced. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, championed self-sufficiency and food sovereignty. Almost overnight the number of wells in Iran doubled.My father, Sayyed Ahang Kowsar, was a scientist, who worked on preventing desertification in Iran by using floodwater to recharge aquifers since the early 1970s. Before the 1979 revolution, Iran had just 14 major dams and fewer than 80,000 wells, but within three years the number of wells had doubled and the new government was planning hundreds of dams.Between 1980 and 1988, as the war with Iraq drained the national budget, only a handful of dams were under construction. After the war, my father and his scientist colleagues warned that dams and water-intensive farming were unsustainable in a warming climate. But their voices were drowned out when Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the relatively moderate leader, took office as President of Iran, a few months after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, and aggressively championed privatization of the economy—a policy outlook that ignored ecological concerns.The rise of a water mafiaPresident Rafsanjani empowered some key institutions: Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters, the engineering arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Iran Water and Power Resources Development Company (I.W.P.C.O.), a state-owned enterprise founded by regime insiders. And there was Mahab Ghodss, an incredibly powerful and opaque consulting firm run by regime insiders, which drafted the studies for dam projects and lobbied for approval.The trinity formed a closed loop: I.W.P.C.O. commissioned the dam building projects based on outdated Western blueprints and without environmental safeguards; Mahab Ghodss lobbied; and Khatam, the I.R.G.C. engineering wing, walked away with the construction contracts. From this collaboration emerged Iran’s “water mafia”— a cartel of ministry officials, politically connected consultancies, IRGC contractors, and their academic allies.Dams and water diversions became engines of patronage, enriching insiders, killing rivers and exacting a terrible cost from rural communities. Projects were approved without proper reviews, and hundreds of dams rose without environmental safeguards.Lake Urmia in western Iran is the starkest instance of ecological destruction. Once the largest lake in the Middle East, it was reduced to a salt-crusted basin by the 2010s, starved of inflows after a dam-building frenzy throttled the rivers feeding it.Even in regions without dams, farmers pumped recklessly from unmonitored wells. Aquifers collapsed, fertile plains subsided, and deserts spread. It was all justified in the name of self-sufficiency. Inter basin transfers created the illusion of abundance. Rain-fed fields in arid areas that had relied on dry farming for centuries were converted to water-intensive farms growing rice, and alfalfa.The cycle of mismanagement spanned administrations. President Mohammad Khatami, who was in office from 1997 to 2005, grew up in Yazd province in central Iran, an arid region that relied on qanats for survival and development. Khatami backed water transfers to his home region and supported I.W.P.C.O. ‘s relentless drive to build multimillion dollar water megaprojects. In 2001, I published some essays in Norouz, an Iranian newspaper, criticizing his administration’s unsustainable water management plans. Khatami summoned me and heard my warning. Soon, I was banned from writing about water.In the late 2000s, as the climate warmed further, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad loosened restrictions on well drilling and started another dam building spree. Policies supposed to appease farmers destroyed their land and water. Farmers once proud of living and working their ancestral land were driven into poverty and forced into shantytowns. By the summer of 2024, more than 10,000 villages in Iran had no access to drinking water. A broader water crisis was affecting some 27,000 villages, stripped their residents of work and status.The water mafia kept building dams that would never fill. Plains sank as water tables fell mostly from the 1990s and fertile lands turned to dust. Aquifers could be recharged on modest budgets through flood-spreading and rainwater harvesting that had proven effective in countries like India. But these nature-based solutions were dismissed in favor of multi-million dollar contracts that enriched regime insiders. Oversight bodies and parliament looked the other way; some lawmakers aligned with the water mafia’s agenda.How to confront Iran’s water scarcityIran is a stark case study of governments doubling down on bad policies. Iran has already crossed into water bankruptcy and no hidden reserves remain. Many experts, including a former agriculture minister, have repeatedly cautioned that Iran must keep water use below 40% of renewable supplies, leaving enough for rivers to flow, wetlands to breathe, and aquifers to naturally recharge. Instead, agriculture accounts for nearly 90% of water usage, including withdrawing non-renewable water reserves.Iran faces a grave threat and needs to rethink its catastrophic mismanagement of water. Many of the world’s top water scientists are Iranian, who have been forced into exile or sidelined at home by Iran’s entrenched water mafia. They are well equipped to help Iran if they were allowed to. Iran may need an independent water authority insulated from partisan politics. A serious plan to confront the water bankruptcy would begin by balancing water consumption to the land’s natural supply and reserving a share for the environment. Iran can achieve that by abandoning water-hungry crops, shifting to smart farming, conserving every drop, and reviving flood-management techniques Iranians once mastered to recharge depleted aquifers. Tehran also has to say no to megaprojects that devour budgets and ecosystems. Reckless schemes like scaling up desalinated seawater transfers will only worsen the damage.Tehran loses nearly a third of its water through broken pipes.Smarter city systems—leak detection, pressure control, wastewater reuse—are essential fixes. Securing a livable future demands collective responsibility and public participation in reshaping governance before the wells run dry. The water crisis won’t stop at Iran’s borders as disputes over shared river basins with neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan could ignite the region’s next security flashpoint.Unlike Ayatollah Khamenei, the future leaders of Iran will not be able to dodge global standards forever. Supporting exiled expertise, tying international aid and diplomacy to sustainable water governance, and treating access to water as a human right would send a clear signal that the crisis is not just technical—it is existential.