People shop water storage tanks following a drought crisis in Tehran, Iran, Nov. 10, 2025. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS

Iran’s water crisis has continued to deteriorate, with the country experiencing a severe drought which has prompted calls to evacuate the capital of Tehran, whose metropolitan area is home to approximately 15 million people.

From Sept. 23 to Nov. 28, Iran averaged 3.9 millimeters of rain, a staggering drop of 88.3 percent compared to the longterm average of 33.5 millimeters, according to Iran’s meteorology authorities.

“Nature is now imposing hard limits,” Amir AghaKouchak, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine, told CNN. “For decades, policies have encouraged the expansion of irrigated agriculture in arid regions,” he explained, echoing others who have identified many years of economic, agricultural, and policy decisions which have drained the desert nation’s aquifers.

AghaKouchak described the current drought as the worst for at least 40 years.

Iran’s state-run ISNA news site reported that the country had not seen rain in November’s last week and that the four provinces experiencing the worst conditions were Bushehr, South Khorasan, Qom, and Yazd. ISNA also named Tehran Province as a region with low rain, citing a 97.4 percent drop. Factors named as impacting the drought included drying wetlands, decreases in humidity, fewer clouds, failure to update infrastructure, expansion of agriculture into dry regions, growth in the oil industry, building too many dams, and “intensified land subsidence.”

Iran has reached a state of “water bankruptcy,” according to Kaveh Madani, who served as deputy head of Iran’s Department of Environment. He is currently director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health.

Mohsen Mesgaran, an associate professor of plant sciences at the University of California, Davis, told CNN that “an estimated 30 percent of treated drinking water is lost through old, leaky distribution systems, and there’s very little water recycling.”

Ali Bitollahi, head of the Earthquake Engineering and Risk Department at the Road, Housing, and Urban Development Research Center, labeled the drought “very serious” and called it the “driest autumn in the country.”

Reuters reported that 10 percent of the dams in the country had run dry.

Mohsen Ardakani, the director general of the Tehran Provincial Water and Sanitation Authority, said last month that the main reservoirs supplying the capital city were at 11 percent capacity, according to Iran’s semi-official Mehr News Agency.

The Latyan Dam outside Tehran is reportedly around 9 percent full, while the Amir Kabir Dam is around 8 percent of its capacity.

Mashhad, Iran’s second largest metropolitan area with 3 million people, had reached 3 percent of its water capacity, according to Hossein Esmailian, head of the city’s water and wastewater utility company.

The Mehr News Agency reported that wheat production in the country dropped 30 percent due to the previous year’s drought.

The government has explored using cloud seeding to provoke rain but has seen limited results.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has stated that water rationing will begin this month if rain does not return. On Nov. 6, he said that “even if we do ration and it still does not rain, then we will have no water at all. They [citizens] have to evacuate Tehran.”

About two weeks later, Pezeshkian said that the country “has no choice” but to relocate its capital, warning that severe ecological strain has made Tehran impossible to sustain.

“The truth is, we have no choice left — relocating the capital is now a necessity,” he said during a televised national address, asserting that the deepening crisis has “rendered the city uninhabitable.”

However, Mesgaran noted that “most households simply can’t afford such a move,” asking, “Where would people even go?”

Amid the water crisis, the Iranian regime has spent significant resources on bolstering its military and nuclear programs, spending an estimated billions of dollars on support for its terrorist proxies abroad.

According to the US Treasury Department, for example, Iran has provided more than $100 million per month to Hezbollah so far this year alone, with $1 billion representing only a portion of Tehran’s overall support for the Lebanese terrorist group.