Iran’s Water and Soil Crisis Will Destroy the Country

By Edward Era Barbacena

Prediction of a long-term hydrological drought in the early 2011s by NASA was not accepted by the Iranian government. In addition, the warnings of four decades of water resource mismanagement by water and environmental experts were also neglected by the regime’s officials too and finally, climate change and the occurrence of meteorological and climatic droughts and the reduction of rainfall and increase of the temperature exacerbate the effects of the regime’s mismanagements.

The most important and harmful axis of water resources mismanagement in Iran was investing in food self-sufficiency, which led to unregulated and unsustainable agricultural development.

This unwise policy has led to the uncontrolled abstraction of surface and groundwater resources and the development subsidence and has led to the destruction of a large part of the country’s renewable water resources.

However, a review of official statistics and information shows that in recent years, not only the regime has not achieved food and agricultural self-sufficiency, but also due to the spread of poverty and inflation, and unemployment, people’s purchasing power has decreased sharply, and food security is jeopardized more than ever.

The devastating effects and consequences of endangering food security in any country are far more dangerous and tragic than the lack of food self-sufficiency.

The crisis of quantitative and qualitative water resources is almost nothing compared to the crisis of quantitative and qualitative soil resources.

Because the crisis of water quantity and quality can be solved by spending an exorbitant amount of money and importing water or desalination of seawater and many other solutions, but very valuable soil resources that are lost due to the regime’s mismanagement every year is suffering a severe erosion. And the soil that remains is being severely salted, and cannot be compensated under any circumstances, and in the long run, it will destroy the land, civilization, and life.

International authorities emphasize that to achieve sustainable development, it is necessary to pay balanced attention to all economic, political, and social aspects in the form of good governance. However, the regime considers only its destructive economic goals which are in the favor of themselves, which has led to unbalanced development.

The failed policy of agricultural self-sufficiency, improving agriculture with lower water consumption, ignoring the natural potentials of the country, creating stable job opportunities to decrease the pressure on the country’s water resources, plans to increase the country’s population, inattention to the settlement of the population in regions with low or critical water resources, expansion of the metropoles, the establishment of high-water consuming industries on wrong places, ignoring water loss in the distribution network, the existence of the laws in contradiction with the nature, has led the country to a water source failure, so the that the regime is forced to think about the import of water with high expenses, transfer of water between water basins, seawater desalination and its transfer to the central plateau of the country, which will have many environmental consequences.

In addition to technical and specialized difficulties, water import has special complexities in legal, diplomatic, political, environmental, economic, social, and even security aspects. Normally, importing water is not economical. Even water desalination in the country is not economical.

The worst effect is that now after 42 years the mullahs are making the country dependent on other countries, because water is a vital necessity, and the regime cannot ignore it, and projects will add a huge amount of expenses to the country’s broken economy.

For example, to transfer water into the country from the south, at least about 500 kilometers of a pipeline is needed, which imposes very heavy costs on the country and prolongs the implementation time of the project.

Seawater desalination projects should be done using renewable energy to minimize environmental damage, but Iran is far behind the southern Gulf countries in terms of renewable energy development.

According to the regime’s fifth and sixth five-year development plans, they were supposed to launch about 10,000 megawatts of renewable electricity in the country, but during the last ten years, the total amount of renewable energy generated has not reached even 1,000 megawatts.

Which is a sign of the regime’s capital waste in its nuclear project, which is growing skepticism about the regime’s ambitions to gain nuclear weapons.

One of the biggest future crises in the country, which has not been considered so far, is the consequences associated with a sharp drop in groundwater levels and the development of subsidence.

Currently, the Ministry of Energy is making every effort to provide the water resources needed for drinking, agriculture, and industry in the crisis-hit areas of the country and is not thinking of balancing aquifers and supplying groundwater reservoirs to reduce the rate of subsidence.

Finally, if the regime continues its 42 years policy, we will see the destruction of Iran and its civilization.