Decades of mismanagement, corruption pushed Iran toward water collapse - analysis

Average rainfall over the last water year fell sharply below the long-term norm, leaving much of the country in significant drought and draining key reservoirs to historic lows.

The crisis is the latest and starkest sign of a deeper structural problem: a water system hollowed out by decades of mismanagement, corruption, and over-extraction, increasingly described inside Iran as the work of a “water mafia” linked to powerful political and military networks.

At the same time, Iran’s economy is cracking under high inflation and sluggish growth, eroding purchasing power and pushing more people into poverty even as basic services falter.

Against that backdrop, a new phase of unrest is taking shape.

Water protests in provinces such as Khuzestan and Isfahan, where demonstrators chanted “I am thirsty” and camped in dry riverbeds, have folded into broader anger over rising prices, corruption, and personal freedoms, drawing many women into the streets without compulsory hijab despite repeated crackdowns since the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022.

For cartoonist and water policy analyst Nik Kowsar, the starting point is clear: Iran’s drought is not just about climate.

“I don’t really see this as a ‘natural’ drought. What we’re living through is an anthropogenic drought, mostly man-made, then turbocharged by climate change,” he told The Media Line.

Kowsar said that after the Iran–Iraq War, reconstruction was driven less by rebuilding people’s lives than by a cascade of mega-projects funneling money and concrete through a tight circle of favored institutions.

“Three names kept coming up in project after project: Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters as the main contractor, Iran Water and Power Resources Development Company as the project developer, and Mahab Ghods as the key consultant,” he added.

These projects were presented as a path to self-sufficiency under sanctions and as symbols of national pride. In reality, Kowsar said, they entrenched a patronage economy that funneled public money into a tight circle of contractors and consultants while aquifers were drained and rivers diverted.

He stressed that climate change has worsened the problem, but did not create it.

“Climate change is the heat, but the system lit the fire. What you see in Khuzestan, Isfahan, Sistan-Baluchestan, and many other places is the result of bad governance, chronic mismanagement, and a foreign policy that constantly needs to prove ‘self-sufficiency, ’” he said.

“The outcome is obvious on the ground: lakes gone, rivers turned into drainage canals, wetlands dried out, aquifers collapsing. The damage doesn’t fall equally. It deepens environmental injustice and strips people of both water security and basic dignity, especially in marginal regions where communities don’t have much political leverage and are treated as sacrifice zones,” he added.

“When I talk about the ‘water mafia,’ I mean this informal alliance around those three institutions, plus a whole ecosystem of smaller firms, engineers, academics, and fixers who have learned how to turn public funds and natural resources into private gain. Ecological limits, the rights of downstream communities, people’s safety and dignity, those come last, if at all,” he said.

“In the middle of all this, the population climbed from about 37 million to over 90 million in under five decades, while renewable water resources were going in the opposite direction. That, combined with destructive policies, has pushed Iran into water bankruptcy,” he added.

From a different vantage point, Hamid-Reza Najmi, CEO of Geo Acumen, an independent, nonpartisan research and advisory firm focused on the Middle East, sees the same pattern.

Najmi said the current crisis reflects a combination of environmental strain and decades of misrule, with senior figures inside Iran themselves now talking about a “water mafia” that dominates key decisions and profits from scarcity.

“What we’re seeing in Iran today is not just a drought; it’s the collision of natural stress with four decades of political and economic mismanagement,” he told The Media Line.

He also stressed that policy decisions have done more damage than the changing climate itself.

“The real story is how water has been diverted to steel plants and politically favored industries while rivers like the Zayandeh Rud and the Karun dry up,” he said.

“In Khuzestan, Isfahan, and Sistan-Baluchestan, shortages come from decades of over-extraction, ill-conceived dams, and agricultural policies that pushed water-hungry crops into the driest parts of the country. Even Iranian experts acknowledge that mismanagement, not just drought, has created this catastrophe,” he added.

Behind the headline shortages, Kowsar sees a political economy structured around contracts and impunity. Rather than a series of isolated mistakes, he describes a system built to reward the same small circle of companies and power brokers.

“Most of the worst water projects in Iran weren’t innocent technical mistakes; they were profitable choices made inside a corrupt system,” he said.

Kowsar said that lucrative dam and tunnel projects were repeatedly steered to a small group of firms linked to the security establishment and political elites around the so-called water mafia, even when the schemes made very little sense hydrologically.

“For ordinary people, that translates into environmental damage with no justice and a daily sense of humiliation: They see a state that values contracts, kickbacks, and prestige projects more than their lives, land, and dignity,” he added.

The human cost is spreading from the riverbanks into Iran’s social fabric. As groundwater drops and land subsides, entire rural economies are unraveling.

“If you live in a village that depends on groundwater and the pumps keep running year after year, beyond what nature can recharge, the story is very simple: The aquifer drops, the land starts to sink, and fields that once fed families inch toward the desert. When the water is gone, people move,” he noted.

“Families tied to farming and herding end up on the edges of cities, in informal settlements, doing whatever work they can find. … People don’t just lose income; they lose the dignity that comes from staying on their land, using their skills and handing something real to their children,” he added.

Official campaigns, he said, often hit those with the least protection while leaving powerful actors untouched. While authorities publicize crackdowns on unauthorized wells, enforcement frequently spares big agricultural and industrial users.

Kowsar said that while officials trumpet statistics about sealing illegal wells, enforcement often stops at the gates of powerful agricultural, religious, or security institutions whose owners are warned in advance or left alone. “That double standard is one of the main reasons trust in any state's ‘water policy’ has basically evaporated,” he pointed out.

Najmi sees those same dynamics driving a wave of displacement across the country. What begins as environmental degradation, he argued, quickly becomes a social and political crisis.

He described how shrinking groundwater and collapsing rural economies are depopulating villages, forcing families to the edges of struggling cities and turning water into a rallying cry. “These demonstrations begin with ‘We are thirsty,’ but they very quickly become political, because people understand this is not an act of God,” he stressed.

In urban areas, that upheaval collides with an economy already battered by sanctions, mismanagement, and inflation. Power and water cuts, used to ration shrinking supplies, now disrupt daily life, closing small businesses and reinforcing a sense that the state can no longer provide basic stability.

Najmi argued that the expertise to respond exists inside Iran, but it is constrained by politics rather than science.

“Iran absolutely has the engineers and hydrologists to fix this. What it lacks is a governance structure willing to challenge entrenched interests and bring transparency to water allocation. Without accountability, without the rule of law, without public participation, the crisis will deepen, and the public knows it,” he said.

The environmental crisis is unfolding in a country still shaken by the protests that followed Mahsa Amini’s death in morality police custody.

Those demonstrations were met with lethal force, but they also altered public space: In many cities, women continue to go unveiled on buses, in markets, and at rallies, despite renewed enforcement campaigns and the threat of fines or detention.

For Najmi, the water crisis is tightly bound up with this wider challenge to the system.

“And this brings me to something essential. When people take to the streets in Iran, it is not only about a dress code or a headscarf. The headscarf became a symbol, but the grievances go far deeper,” he said.

“Iranians are worried about the future of their water, their health, their children’s prospects, and the collapse of an economy captured by unaccountable networks. They are questioning whether the system that governs them is capable of protecting the very basics of life,” he added.

He argues that water has become one trigger among many, revealing long-standing fractures in the Islamic Republic’s rule.

“This is why you see protests spreading across provinces and social classes. Water is just one trigger among many, but it exposes everything: the corruption, the inequality, women’s forced hijab, the lack of voice, and the fear that the country is being pushed toward irreversible decline,” he noted.

In this context, Kowsar said, environmental scrutiny is increasingly treated like a security threat. Experts who touch sensitive topics, corruption, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)-linked firms, or discriminatory water policies, face harassment or prosecution, reinforcing a climate in which water data itself becomes politicized.

Kowsar said that experts and activists who link water issues to corruption, security bodies, or powerful firms risk far more than criticism, facing real personal and professional retaliation from the state. “If you cross those red lines, the price can be high: harassment, loss of your job, prison,” he added.

The regime, he said, now treats environmental information almost like classified material, from detailed subsidence maps to groundwater data and satellite imagery. In that atmosphere, many activists have pulled back from public confrontation, worried that criticism can be cast as collaboration with foreign enemies.

“When simply questioning a drying river can be twisted into treason, it shows two things very clearly: how deep the material crisis already is, and how threatening the regime finds the moral claim behind it, the claim that Iranians are entitled to land, water, and a life with dignity,” Kowsar noted.

In the short term, much depends on winter rains and how the authorities manage dwindling reserves. But both experts stressed that even an unusually wet year would not solve what they call structural “water bankruptcy.”

Iran’s own data point to a long-term trend of declining precipitation, hotter summers, and more frequent droughts. Yet agriculture still consumes the vast majority of the country’s water while contributing only a modest share of GDP, and large, politically connected industries remain hard to challenge.

Kowsar warned that, without a change in who makes water decisions and who benefits from them, the country will face deepening subsidence, displacement, and unrest. Subsidence, migration, and economic strain are converging, and water shortages are increasingly becoming a flashpoint for broader discontent.

“Inside Iran, water has already become a spark,” he explained. “We’ve seen protests in Khuzestan, Isfahan, and other provinces where people are shouting about dry taps and dead rivers, and they’re not shy about naming officials or the Guards. Security forces can beat or jail individuals, but they can’t arrest a dried-out aquifer,” he added.

As shortages and land subsidence get worse, he argued, anger over water will mix with other grievances, unemployment, corruption, and ethnic discrimination.

For many Iranians, the loss of water security is becoming inseparable from economic pressure and a shrinking public space.

Migration is another looming risk: When land sinks, wells fail, and districts become unlivable, people move, often to informal settlements around already strained cities, fueling competition for jobs and services and heightening social tension.

Kowsar warned that as Iran’s rulers mishandle shrinking water supplies, tensions with neighboring states over rivers and shared basins are likely to grow even if outright conflict never erupts.

“Still, it does mean more diplomatic crises, more cross-border dust and pollution disputes, and more use of dams and river flows as bargaining chips, treating water as a weapon rather than as the basis for shared security and human dignity,” Kowsar noted.

To Najmi, any exit from the crisis depends less on technical fixes than on political will.

“Iran absolutely has the engineers and hydrologists to fix this. What it lacks is a governance structure willing to challenge entrenched interests and bring transparency to water allocation. Without accountability, without the rule of law, without public participation, the crisis will deepen, and the public knows it,” he said.

The water crisis in Iran is no longer a distant environmental issue. It is reshaping where people live, how they work, and how much faith they have in the state’s ability to uphold its side of the social contract.

As rivers like the Zayandeh Rud run dry under historic bridges and Tehran counts down to a possible “Day Zero,” the combination of ecological stress, economic hardship, and demands for personal freedom is testing the regime’s resilience in new ways.

Kowsar believes any real way out would require the authorities to confront the same networks that have profited from the status quo.

“If we’re honest, under the current political structure, the path is extremely narrow,” he said.

“The same actors who profit from bad water projects are parked right next to the levers of power: the IRGC and its engineering arms, the big religious and economic foundations, and a security-bureaucratic machine that sees water first as a strategic asset, not as a public trust,” Kowsar said.

“Iran has to adapt to a new climate, build resilience, and mitigate damage, but that requires a different understanding of dignity. Not just ‘national pride’ in grand structures and record-breaking dams, but respect for people’s right to safe water,” he added.

Najmi hears that demand echoed in the streets.

“The message on the streets is clear: ‘We’re not simply asking for small reforms, we’re asking for a country that can provide dignity, sustainability and a real future,’” he concluded.