War will deepen Iran’s water crisis

An Israeli missile fell a few hundred metres from the Bushehr nuclear power plant during the South Pars missile strike on March 18, threatening not only a nuclear disaster on the order of Chernobyl but cutting off the entire region from its fresh drinking water supplies. However, even if Bushehr is not hit, the war with Israel and the US is going to make Iran’s dire lack of water problem a lot worse.

The Iranian authorities warned the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on March 18 that the Bushehr NPP may be included as a possible Israeli target as Israel seeks to collapse the Iranian economy by destroying its source of income and its energy sector.

Built on the shores of the Gulf, the danger is that nuclear fuel, or even just the reactor’s cooling fluid, would spill into the Persian Gulf and contaminate it. The Gulf countries have little fresh water and are heavily dependent on approximately a hundred desalination plants along the coast. The production of dozens of these plants would be threatened and they would have been closed, causing a major humanitarian crisis that could force millions to leave the region.

So far Bushehr has been untouched, but the war itself is making Iran’s already dire water problem a lot worse. The lack of drinking water could play a decisive factor in the war if hostilities drag on.

As bne IntelliNews reported, Tehran was already facing the possibility of water rationing in December due to a record drought last year. By the end of January the crisis was becoming acute after fourteen dams across Iran's most densely populated provinces saw reserves fall below 10% capacity. The authorities warned that if “day zero” arrived, the capital might have to be evacuated.

Decades of overbuilding and mismanagement of some 600 dams have left Iran with silted, leaky reservoirs and critically low storage levels. Global warming and extreme temperatures as the Climate Crisis accelerates faster than scientists predicted is exacerbating the problem. Work to counter these problems is now impossible after the beginning of Operation Epic Fury has drained away all resources and decapitated the government.

In the summer of 2025, Tehran, along with several other large cities, had to reduce its water consumption as the dams that feed the city completely dried up. This summer the situation will be a lot worse as the region is on track for more record breaking heatwaves. The last three years have already been the hottest in recorded history.

Tehran is a city of about 9mn people and in the frontline for a potential water crisis. In November, President Masoud Pezeshkian took the unusual step of releasing a video warning residents evacuation of the capital could become necessary if rainfall did not arrive soon.

Iran has been enduring its worst drought since 2020 and years with very little rainfall are now ten-times more likely than they were before industrialisation, according to World Weather Attribution, which studies the role of greenhouse gas emissions in extreme weather.

Climate change has compounded the long standing structural problems with Iran’s water system, due to decades of poor water management, misallocation of resources, an inappropriate agriculture policy and corruption.

Iran is the fourteenth most water-stressed country in the world and more than four-fifths of its 93mn population faces extremely high water stress, Bloomberg reports.

And now its infrastructure is under threat from the war. The US took the radical decision and struck Iran’s desalination plant on the island of Qeshm in Strait of Hormuz March 7. Iran struck back, hitting a water facility in Bahrain, and raising the nightmare scenario of Iranian retaliatory strike on all the desalination plants in the region that would make the Gulf effectively uninhabitable. The US denied Tehran’s accusation that it was responsible for the Qeshm incident.

The Middle East hosts more than 40% of the world’s desalination capacity, yet Iran relies on it far less than its neighbours. Only about 3% of the country’s drinking water comes from desalination plants, compared with more than half in Saudi Arabia and around 90% in Kuwait. Iran’s water problem is not caused by its lack of naturally occurring water, but the shoddy state of its infrastructure.

The development of the infrastructure was shaped by political patronage rather than long-term planning. Contracts were handed out to allies of the state and military – a network widely referred to inside Iran as the “water mafia”, a term used by Donald Trump in May in a speech in Riyadh.

Poor agricultural policy has added to the strain on the system -- agriculture accounts for roughly 90% of water use - by promoting water-intensive crops and attempting to be self-sufficient in food production, when it would make more sense to use the water for other means and import goods from more verdant neighbours.

The heavy use of water in agriculture was exacerbated by expanding farming into some of Iran’s driest regions which accelerated groundwater depletion and drained aquifers.

Iran’s short lived rainy season is already over and the intense heat of summer is on its way. Authorities fear a repeat of 2023 when Iran declared a two-day holiday in August after temperatures topped a record 50°C – one of the hottest summers on record. As the disaster season gets underway, this year could be at least as bad, or possibly worse. Climate models from bodies such as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and Copernicus predict a high probability (around 80–90%) that one of the next few years will set a new all-time global temperature record.