Water reserves in Tehran, Mashhad, and Kerman reach historic lows as experts warn of looming large-scale displacement.
A deepening water crisis has plunged several Iranian provinces, including Tehran, Mashhad, and Kerman, into emergency conditions, with regime officials quietly implementing what many describe as “practical rationing.” In the capital, senior water authorities warn that the city’s reservoirs have reached “strategic volume,” a threshold that cannot be breached without risking the safety of dams and the broader supply network.
Rama Habibi, deputy head of the Tehran Regional Water Company, announced on Saturday that the capital’s dam storage levels have dropped so low that any further withdrawals would compromise structural safety and operational capacity. He explained that the dams have not yet reached “dead volume,” but the remaining storage is now so limited that it must be preserved to prevent system failure.
Although no Tehran dams have officially been taken offline, Habibi acknowledged that several have fallen to levels where even technical extraction is no longer possible. The “strategic volume” he referenced is the emergency reserve maintained for extreme droughts or floods and is not intended for regular consumption.
Tehran is currently experiencing its sixth consecutive year of drought. Latian Dam has fallen to its lowest level in sixty years, and the Karaj Dam is now operating with less than ten percent of its capacity. As a result, approximately seventy percent of Tehran’s water supply now comes from overexploited groundwater sources, many of which face critical depletion and increasing risk of land subsidence.
Isa Bozorgzadeh, spokesperson for Iran’s national water industry, stated that “pressure management” remains one of the key tools to delay further deterioration of water supplies. Reduced water pressure continues across the capital during late-night and early-morning hours, extending in milder form throughout the day. He warned that if citizens do not cut consumption by at least ten percent, pressure reductions may expand into new areas and additional hours.
Nationwide rainfall has collapsed to historic lows. Mohammad Javanbakht, head of Iran’s Water Resources Management Company, noted that only 3.5 millimeters of rainfall have been recorded in the past fifty days, which is just eighteen percent of the long-term seasonal average. Twenty provinces have recorded no rain at all, and the previous water year marked Iran’s fifth consecutive year of severe drought. According to Javanbakht, Tehran and Bandar Abbas faced the lowest water availability in their documented histories.
Rainfall deficits of forty percent have pushed national reservoirs to their lowest levels in more than a decade. In Mashhad, Nasrollah Pejmanfar, head of the parliament’s Article 90 Commission, declared that the “Doosti Dam has no transferable water left and Mashhad’s reservoirs have effectively reached zero.” He confirmed that the city has entered a state of rationing.
Pejmanfar blamed the worsening crisis on mismanagement, the absence of watershed planning, and ineffective groundwater protection. He said Iran’s basins have a capacity of about 400 billion cubic meters, but mismanagement allows much of this water to leave the country unused.
Conditions in Kerman illustrate the accelerating collapse of local ecosystems. Traditional qanats are drying up, groundwater has turned increasingly saline, farms and orchards are dying, and local wildlife faces widespread habitat loss. Water in many areas flows only through deteriorated pumps, while excessive household and agricultural consumption worsens the strain. Experts warn that continued reliance on flood irrigation, inappropriate crop patterns, and unchecked groundwater extraction has pushed the region toward an “ecosystem death” threshold.
Although officials routinely cite drought as the primary cause, water experts argue that entrenched mismanagement, unregulated urban expansion, intensive development projects, and the absence of long-term consumption planning are the real drivers. Over-extraction from thousands of wells around Tehran, massive leakage in the distribution network, rapid construction growth, expansive new housing permits, and the minimal adoption of modern water-management technologies have all contributed to the escalation.
Water specialists caution that if current trends continue, supplying water to between thirty and fifty percent of Tehran’s population may become impossible within five to ten years. Some experts have even warned that without meaningful winter rainfall, Iran may enter a far more severe phase of rationing, including the potential “localized evacuation” of affected regions.
