December 24, 2025 | 01:39 pm
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Tuesday admitted that the depleting water supply across the country is a critical national issue.
Iran is experiencing its worst drought in 60 years, causing a significant number of major reservoirs to dry up and forcing authorities in the capital to impose nightly water cuts.
"Water problems exist in all provinces of our country. Water supply in Iran is in crisis," President Pezeshkian said in a speech at the parliament, as quoted by IRNA.
He added that the challenge cannot be addressed solely by redistributing water.
“Water economics, farming patterns, irrigation, and industry are all problematic because we have allowed non-expert growth,” he said.
Pezeshkian emphasized that policy-making should rely on expert opinions to ensure the right decisions, noting that specialists should use not only domestic assessments but also global data and international consultations.
“Without expert work and the use of committed professionals, we will not be able to overcome the crises facing the country,” he said.
After five years of extreme drought, the prolonged water crisis in Iran reached unprecedented levels in November. Pezeshkian stated that Iran only received three percent of the usual precipitation throughout 2025 compared to previous years.
On December 1, the Iranian news agency ISNA reported that Iran's main reservoirs were only 32 percent full.
In July, the head of Iran's water resources company, Hashem Amini, estimated that about half of the urban population lacked drinking water.
According to Amini, in less than 30 years, the volume of renewable water sources in Iran has decreased from 132 billion to 90 billion cubic meters, or more than 30 percent, while water consumption in the country has increased.
Pezeshkian warned that Iran "has no choice" but to relocate its dry capital of Tehran, which now has a population of around 10 million, to a wetter coastal region - a project that will take decades and is estimated by analysts to cost around US$100 billion.
The President of Iran called for the relocation of the 10 million-populated capital after the water levels in five Tehran reservoirs dropped by 12 percent of their capacity last month.
What Triggers the Water Crisis
Although the lack of rain may be the direct cause of the crisis, hydrology experts say, the root cause is more than half a century of often foolhardy modern water engineering - which began before the country's Islamic revolution in 1979, but accelerated by the policies of the Ayatollahs since then.
“The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” said Keveh Madani, former deputy head of the country's environment department and now director of the United Nations University's Institute of Water, Environment and Health, at Yale Environment 360 last week.
To address the increasingly worsening water shortage in the rapidly developing cities in the country, “Iran was one of the top three dam-builders in the world” at the end of the 20th century, said Penelope Mitchell, a geography expert at the Global Water Security Center at the University of Alabama, United States.
Dozens of dams were built on rivers that were too small to support them.
Instead of addressing water shortages, these reservoirs have increased water losses due to evaporation from large surfaces, Mitchell said. Meanwhile, the dams have reduced downstream river flow and dried up wetlands and groundwater reserves.
Currently, many reservoirs behind these dams are almost empty.
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