Iran braces for water rationing as reservoirs hit historic lows

“The government, which has grown large and costly over the years, has placed much of the inflation burden on the people,” Pezeshkian said during a meeting with provincial officials in Kordestan province.

“While the state should serve producers, in many sectors we have reached a point where there are plenty of directors and managers but little productivity.”

He added that structural reform lies in downsizing the government, a process he described as difficult and time-consuming because “many have grown accustomed to rank and ceremony, and that mindset must change.”

Pezeshkian also warned that excessive state spending beyond national means “ultimately translates into inflation that weighs on people’s livelihoods.” 

He said he had instructed provincial governors to reduce administrative expenses to free resources for supporting vulnerable groups.

The president acknowledged that international sanctions had intensified economic strains but said domestic inefficiencies, rather than foreign pressure alone, remained the root cause of inflation that official data places at about 40%.

Another caller to The Program, a Persian-language call-in show I host each week, is from a smaller town. He stands beside a trickle of wastewater coursing through the street: “We haven’t had municipal water for five days.”

The voices sound less like news than like prognosis—a country short of breath.

Iran is drying up. Not only its land, but its civic lungs. The skies over Tehran and Mashhad hang gray with smoke; taps sputter, rivers have turned to beds of dust.

Political choice

On the program, my guest was Kaveh Madani, an Iranian water scholar who briefly joined the government in 2017 to help address the crisis and left within months after being accused—without evidence—of espionage.

Madani’s view, refined over two decades of research and public warnings, is as bracing as it is simple: Iran’s environmental catastrophe is not primarily a natural disaster. It is a political choice.

The country has spent beyond its ecological income, mortgaging rivers and aquifers to service short-term promises. When scientists say so, their work is treated as a security risk. “When knowledge becomes ‘security,’ water is no longer security,” Madani said. The result is a landscape—and a society—running on a deficit.

In Iran, the term water bankruptcy describes a national ledger that no longer balances: demand far outstrips supply, aquifers are pumped down, the ground in places is subsiding, and, as Madani notes, land that sinks does not rise again.

The problem did not begin with climate change, even if warming now sharpens it. It began with governance—an edifice of big-build solutions (dams, canals, inter-basin transfers), political patronage and the reflex to appease unrest with engineering. Water is moved from province to province to quiet protests. More concrete is poured.

More rivers are chained. The political horizon, not the hydrological one, dictates the map.

By 2025, Madani’s argument is stark: environmental collapse is now braided with economic free fall and political isolation. You cannot fix the rivers without reforming the state.

Dried up

If that sounds abstract, the callers to the show provide the texture. A man from Sari, on the lush Caspian rim, described forests in retreat and soil racing to the sea.

A resident of Rasht said rivers he fished just three years ago are now lanes for cars. A Tehrani, furious and weary, ticked through familiar grievances—corruption, arbitrary arrests, a ruling class insulated from consequences—and asked whether anyone in power still believed in stewardship.

The only honest first step is to stop making things worse: tell the truth about the books, end prestige projects that burn scarce capital, align prices and incentives with reality and accept that some losses are irreversible.

After that, recovery is measured in years, not news cycles—and only if nature cooperates.

This is where Iran’s story diverges from the American impulse to frame environmental problems as consumer choices, solved by shorter showers and fewer flushes.

Individual virtue matters—especially in a crisis—but austerity at the household level cannot, by itself, balance a national water budget that is upside down by design.

The state sets the price of water and energy; it licenses (or averts its eyes from) illegal wells; it awards contracts that entrench use in the wrong places; it criminalizes data; it treats environmentalists as suspects.

In that world, scolding people for litter while subsidizing waste is a form of political theater.

The nearest analogue may be the Appalachia of extraction: places where policy, patronage and geology created a cycle of dependence and damage—then blamed the people who inhaled the dust.

'Luxury issue'

Iran’s twist is the securitization of science. If measurements are secrets and models are subversion, managers fly blind. You can’t manage what you refuse to count.

There is also a moral geometry to scarcity. For years, environmentalists were caricatured as elites obsessed with lakes and Persian cheetahs while ordinary people struggled with sanctions and inflation.

That framing has collapsed. When taps go dry in Tehran—the political capital and the country’s most privileged city—the environmental crisis stops being a “luxury issue.”

It becomes infrastructure, public health, and, in time, migration. In the program’s stray audio clips, you can hear the new rhythm: not ideology, but symptoms. Coughing. Fatigue. A neighbor’s bucket brigade. Politics is loud; dehydration is quiet.

The obvious question has two answers, and they are in tension.

The first is civic: keep attention on the crisis so politicians cannot look away. That means a culture of care (less waste, more local stewardship) but also a stubborn insistence on transparency: publish data, protect researchers, allow the press to ask hard questions without fear.

The second is structural: accept that environmental recovery is inseparable from economic and diplomatic reform.

Iran can, with humility and time, plan its way out of parts of it.

That will require a different politics: one that treats knowledge as a public good rather than a threat; one that measures success by the quiet arithmetic of aquifers; one that accepts, as a precondition for any national renewal, that nature does not negotiate.

The rain may come this year. It may not. But until knowledge flows freely, Iran’s drought will not be meteorological—it will be moral.

Ali Seyedzadeh, the director general of the National Water and Wastewater Management Office, told state television that rainfall across Iran since the beginning of October totaled just 2.2 millimeters -- down 83% from last year and 77% below long-term averages. 

“We are in an extremely concerning situation,” he said, warning that weather forecasts show no rain in the coming weeks.

He added that the decline has left reservoirs severely depleted, with major dams including those supplying Tehran, Isfahan, and Khuzestan operating at minimal levels.

Seyedzadeh said Tehran’s five main dams now hold less than 200 million cubic meters of water -- about one-third of their normal volume -- with the Amir Kabir Dam at only 8% of capacity and the Laar Dam at 1%.

He said nationwide water loss through aging pipelines is estimated at 15%, and called for urgent measures such as installing smart meters and water-saving devices in high-use households.

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  Tehran’s main dam holds less than two weeks of water supply

Looming water rationing in Tehran

Authorities in Tehran have warned that the capital could face water rationing within weeks as the city’s main reservoir, the Amir Kabir Dam, is nearing depletion. 

Habibi, deputy head of Tehran’s Regional Water Company, said the Amir Kabir Dam -- one of the capital’s five main water sources -- holds only about 14 million cubic meters of water, compared to 86 million cubic meters a year ago. 

“Only four or five million cubic meters remain extractable,” he told the semi-official Tasnim news agency. “We urgently need public cooperation to manage water consumption efficiently.”

“We hope to see precipitation later in the water year to make up the deficit,” Habibi said, adding that conservation “is the only short-term solution to protect Tehran’s limited water reserves.”

Officials said the dam is now 85% empty, describing the situation as critical. The company’s head, Behzad Parsa, told IRNA last week that the reservoir’s remaining capacity would cover less than two weeks of the city’s demand.

Tehran, home to nearly nine million people, depends on five dams -- all reporting sharp declines. 

The Laar and Mamloo reservoirs are at 1% and 7% capacity respectively, while only Taleghan remains above one-third. Local newspaper Haft-e Sobh warned that if autumn rains fail to materialize, “widespread rationing and water cuts” could begin across the capital.

“Through the sanctions that we’ve had around the world, an enormous amount of oil is stuck and dislocated,” Torbjorn Tornqvist, Gunvor’s chief executive, told the ADIPEC energy conference in Abu Dhabi.

“This is unprecedented, the size of that. Therefore, obviously, if all sanctions would disappear, this market would clearly be quite oversupplied,” he added.

The European Union, United Kingdom and the United States have imposed sweeping sanctions on Moscow since its invasion of Ukraine, including new US measures last month targeting Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s two biggest oil producers. 

Washington and its allies have also maintained restrictions on Iran’s crude exports over its nuclear program and regional activities.

Traders and analysts say the curbs have redrawn global energy flows, forcing sanctioned crude onto “dark fleet” tankers and into longer, less transparent routes that keep large volumes in transit or storage.

Tornqvist said that while the market remains tight on paper, the hidden inventory floating offshore represents a “buffer” that could quickly weigh on prices if restrictions were eased.

“Effectively, we have a shadow market operating alongside the official one,” he said, noting that the structure of the global oil trade has become more fragmented and less efficient as a result of sanctions.

Oil prices have traded in a narrow range in recent weeks, with Brent crude hovering around $84 per barrel as investors weigh supply risks from the Middle East and the lingering impact of Western sanctions on sanctioned producers.

At the same conference, Marco Dunand, chief executive and co-founder of Mercuria Energy Group, one of the world’s largest independent energy traders, said that while global inventories remain low, the volume of oil held at sea is rising, signaling a gradual build-up of surplus supply. 

He added that Western sanctions continue to act as a “wild card” in determining how much crude reaches the market, estimating that a potential surplus of around two million barrels per day could narrow to about one million. 

“The glut is forming slowly,” Dunand said, “and will probably start to hit the market in the next few months.” 

A group of retirees from Iran's Telecommunications Company held protest gatherings and marches in the cities of Shiraz, Tabriz, Isfahan, Khoy, and Tehran among others, labor news agency ILNA reported.

Participants chanted "They took Telecom away and handed it to the wolf," criticizing policies of the company, whose main shareholders include the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Cooperative Foundation.

The retirees protested against delays in payments, welfare allowances, insurance issues and healthcare services.

Nurses protest

Nurses rallied for unpaid wages, holding a protest gathering in front of the Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences building in western Iran.

They criticized the non-payment of over a year's worth of shift allowances and overtime, protesting what they called officials neglect of their demands.

"We protest the injustice, discrimination and neglect of our one-year demands and request the University President respond to us," read one banner held up by protestors.

Oil company employees

Meanwhile a group of Continental Shelf Oil Company employees in Lavan escalated demands for reform in a protest according to human rights website HRANA.

They demanded reform of minimum-wage employees' salaries, full restoration of allowances including hardship climate and family separation premiums, removal of retirement seniority caps, the refund of excess deducted taxes and payment of related arrears.

Tehran Alvan Poultry Food Complex stopped work in protest over three months of unpaid wages, ILNA reported.

The living conditions of retirees, pension recipients, nurse, and workers have led to an increase in protest gatherings in recent years.

At least 3,702 protest gatherings and strikes in various fields were recorded in Iran this year, according to HRANA's annual report.