Tehran’s unprecedented drought and unannounced water rationing expose deep social inequalities and governance failure, as the wealthy bypass shortages, the poor bear the risks, and officials float impossible solutions like evacuating the capital.
Nearly 50 days into the new water year, not a single drop of rain has fallen in Tehran. Nightly water cuts now amount to de facto water rationing. According to the newspaper Shargh, the lack of timely public information has multiplied people’s anxiety and frustration.
Ehad Vazifeh, the head of the National Center for Climate and Drought Crisis Management, describes the current moment as “severe drought,” “water stress,” and a “crisis of water supply,” placing severe pressure on major metropolitan areas such as Tehran, Tabriz, Mashhad, Arak, and Karaj. Meteorological data from 2025 show that Iran is experiencing its driest period in 50 years, while Tehran is enduring the driest year in six decades.
The population of Tehran and Karaj, together with surrounding satellite cities, now stands at roughly 18–20 million. This means nearly one-quarter of Iran’s entire population is directly affected by water stress in the Tehran metropolitan region. According to Vazifeh, the concentration of such a large population in Tehran and Karaj, combined with falling rainfall and rising consumption, has deepened the crisis further.
Reservoir levels in key dams in multiple provinces have dropped to worrying—and in some cases single-digit—percentages. Heavy pressure on groundwater sources is also unsustainable.
In the short term, Vazifeh sees no clear outlook for meaningful precipitation. Forecasts indicate that no significant rainfall system will pass through the country for at least the next 10 days. Over the longer term, however, there is some hope: precipitation in January and February may return to average, potentially easing water stress temporarily. But even a wet winter, he warns, will not solve Iran’s structural water shortage; at best, it will move the country slightly away from its current state of acute crisis.
He calls for a fundamental overhaul in long-term national planning so that water scarcity and each region’s ecological limits become central factors in decisions about agriculture, urban development, and industrial expansion.
Water as a Class Commodity
Tehran’s water rationing cannot be understood simply as an environmental crisis. It is a broad social crisis that sharpens and exposes the city’s structural inequalities. Water rationing itself is not inherently class-based; rather, it is the differing abilities of social groups to adapt that produce class divisions.
Wealthier northern districts, with newer infrastructure and higher private investment, enjoy more reliable service and shorter interruptions even during crisis periods. In contrast, poorer southern and peripheral neighborhoods—already suffering from decaying infrastructure and minimal storage capacity—experience more frequent cuts and severe drops in water pressure. Beyond the practical hardships, this disparity heightens the sense of injustice among lower-income groups and undermines the city’s social cohesion.
For the affluent classes, rationing is not an existential threat but an expensive inconvenience that can be bypassed with money. They install large storage tanks in luxury homes, dig private deep wells, and regularly purchase water from private tanker trucks at high prices. For them, water becomes a luxury commodity preserved through the free market—or its black-market variants. This also creates lucrative opportunities for “water brokers,” turning water scarcity into a profitable business.
As the wealthy maintain their high-consumption lifestyles with minimal disruption, ordinary households struggle with shortages of drinking and sanitation water. The contrast intensifies social resentment and directly undermines the legitimacy of rationing policies and of public governance more broadly.
The middle class suffers the most psychological and economic pressure. Apartment dwellers depend entirely on the central network. They must buy smaller water tanks, filtration devices, and bottled water—pushing household budgets further into strain. Disruptions in bathing, washing, cooking, and maintaining even modest green spaces significantly reduce quality of life. The middle class becomes the main victim of a dysfunctional system—wealthy enough to incur high costs but not wealthy enough to escape them, and lacking the targeted support available to the poorest.
The lower-income and informal settlements endure the worst sanitary and social consequences. In many such neighborhoods, even in normal conditions, access to clean piped water is unreliable. Water rationing risks outbreaks of infectious diseases. Women and children, who often bear the burden of fetching water from distant points, face greater physical and psychological stress. The crisis deepens existing poverty and traps households in a “cycle of deprivation.”
Evacuating Tehran: The President’s “Joke” with the Public
Masoud Pezeshkian, the Islamic Republic’s president, warned in November 2025 that if it did not rain in Tehran by December, the city would enter full water rationing—and if drought continued, the capital would need to be evacuated. He claimed the situation was so dire that Tehran residents might need to abandon the city, as water reserves were running out. He described the crisis as “nature’s revenge” and the result of years of mismanagement.
The remarks triggered widespread reactions. Some politically aligned media outlets called the statements “extreme” and “irresponsible,” arguing they undermine public trust and boost opposition narratives. Environmental experts and members of Tehran’s city council dismissed the evacuation idea as “impossible” and “unscientific,” urging instead a focus on policy reform, resource management, and rebuilding public trust. University professor Hossein Akhani described Pezeshkian’s comments as “erasing the problem rather than addressing it.”
Online, responses ranged from anxiety to ridicule. Political activists viewed the statements as a sign of state incapacity. Akhani added that water scarcity can only be managed through public trust, policy reform, and halting further population growth—not through relocating millions of residents to other cities.
Solutions to the Water Crisis
In the short term, if the worst-case scenario materializes, managing the water crisis will require three urgent and coordinated measures:
- Implement a fair and transparent rationing system, with schedules clearly announced to reduce confusion and mistrust.
- Crack down on the water black market and illegal extraction (such as unauthorized wells) to preserve social cohesion and prevent perceptions of injustice.
- Provide emergency drinking and sanitation water to low-income and informal settlements through free tanker deliveries or distribution stations, to prevent a humanitarian and public-health crisis.
In the medium term, the only realistic solution is to halt all new population and industrial expansion in Tehran and instead focus on demand management and equitable water distribution—not mass evacuation, which is impossible. As Professor Akhani notes, relocating millions is neither feasible nor rational, since other regions also lack the capacity to absorb new residents.
Instead of “evacuating the capital,” the state must prioritize rapid renovation of water infrastructure to reduce extreme losses, expand wastewater recycling for non-potable uses, and impose mandatory changes to agricultural patterns around major cities to ease pressure on dwindling water supplies.
Long-term and foundational solutions require redefining national development based on the actual water capacity of each region. This means establishing and implementing a binding national “land-use and ecological planning framework,” where population distribution, industrial siting, agricultural practices, and even the location of cities are determined by ecological limits rather than expansionist “development dreams.” Under such a framework, new development in highly stressed regions like Tehran would cease entirely, while major investment would go into sustainable technologies such as non-fossil desalination and fully modern, water-efficient agriculture.
Given the current level of incompetence and structural corruption in the Islamic Republic, even imagining efficient water-tanker distribution in a metropolis is unrealistic—let alone implementing long-term systemic solutions. From this perspective, Pezeshkian’s proposal to “evacuate the capital” aligns all too well with the regime’s governing logic: extract as much as possible, and when the crisis peaks, shut the door on your way out.
