Iran faces a water crisis amid its worst drought in at least six decades. Reservoirs in the country's capital have dipped to historically low levels. One of the five major dams that helps supply water to over 10 million people in Tehran has nearly run dry.
Overnight water rationing has begun there, and government officials warn that more drastic steps may be needed to cope with the crisis. "We'll have to evacuate Tehran," warned Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran's president, per The New York Times.
Some Iranians are espousing conspiracy theories on social media that blame neighboring countries for "stealing" their rain clouds. "The U.S. and Israel are manipulating the weather by redirecting rain clouds away from Iran to deliberately trigger drought," according to Mohsen Arbabian, an Iranian water resources specialist.
Even Isa Bozorgzadeh, Iran's water industry spokesperson, didn't totally dispel the claims of conspiracy theorists. "However, since human knowledge is constantly advancing, we cannot rule out every possibility," Bozorgzadeh recently told reporters.
There has been no credible scientific evidence that anyone is modifying the weather in order to divert rainfall away from Iran. The World Meteorological Organization has said it is not physically possible.
"It should be realized that the energy involved in weather systems is so large that it is impossible to create cloud systems that rain, alter wind patterns to bring water vapor into a region, or eliminate severe weather phenomena," according to the WMO. "Weather modification technologies that claim to achieve such large-scale or dramatic effects do not have a sound scientific basis and should be treated with suspicion."
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Scientists say the causes of Iran's water crisis include the long-term impacts of an overheating planet, the mismanagement of water resources, dam construction, and inefficient agriculture.
"Iran is considerably impacted by the consequences of climate change," said the United Nations Children's Fund, an agency that works in more than 190 countries and territories to protect the rights and well-being of children. The "country's average temperature has increased by 2 degrees Celsius since the 1960s, rainfall has decreased 20% in the last 20 years and precipitation patterns are changed. It is estimated that Iran will experience an increase of 2.6 degrees in mean temperatures and a 35% decline in precipitation in the next decades."
Our warming world is intensifying extreme weather events around the world. A team of international scientists released a study in Nature this spring that concluded our overheating planet is accelerating global drought severity.
The study analyzed how atmospheric evaporative demand, a measure of the atmosphere's capacity to draw moisture from our planet's surface, is impacting drought conditions worldwide.
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Never 👎 "During the past 5 years (2018-2022), the areas in drought have expanded by 74% on average compared with 1981-2017, with AED contributing to 58% of this increase," concluded the study. "The year 2022 was record-breaking, with 30% of the global land area affected by moderate and extreme droughts, 42% of which was attributed to increased AED. Our findings indicate that AED has an increasingly important role in driving severe droughts and that this tendency will likely continue under future warming scenarios."
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