A couple of months back, we internally flagged a Scientific American story with a most curious, attention-grabbing headline: ‘Iran’s Capital Is Moving.’ The ayatollahs claimed they had “no choice” but to relocate Tehran.
Why would a cash-strapped country with, shall we say, plenty of other problems on its hands even be thinking about such a massive (ballpark $100B+) endeavor?
Because it’s running out of water.
Tehran is sinking tens of centimeters annually and the capital faces a prospective “Day Zero” where reservoirs run dry and taps go empty. Iran’s 90M people are facing their worst drought in decades, with aquifers collapsing, the country’s central plateau growing ecologically unstable, rivers drying to dusty beds, and water-rationing mandates stretching across cities and provinces.
When your reservoirs run dry, apparently even the sky becomes an enemy combatant…
While it’d be a fool’s errand to try and pin the current uprising to any one variable — political dissatisfaction, economic despair, and regional instability are a powerful, volatile cocktail — we shouldn’t discount the water crisis as a contributor to the government’s crisis of illegitimacy.
Rather than address decades of dam over-engineering and extractive agricultural policies, the regime has done what regimes do: point fingers. Neighbors Turkey, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia stand accused of diverting rain clouds, while Israel and the U.S. have been blamed for manipulating the weather.
As the situation has worsened, Iran has throttled power generation — much of which remains tied to water-intensive infrastructure. Blackouts compound protests, the regime responds with bullets and batons, this brutality invites further protest, and so the negative feedback loop spins.
“There is nothing noble in shrinking before the storm.”
In The End of Thirst Traps, we wrote about a different dry place facing a similar reckoning: the American Southwest. Good news on that front: California is completely drought-free for the first time in 25 years. But the nation’s largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Powell, still sit far below capacity, and the Colorado River’s flow has dropped 20% since 2000. A wet winter buys time but doesn’t reconcile the structural deficit we laid out.
Iran’s crisis is its own, shaped by the regime’s mismanagement and political rot, but the underlying physics are universal. Water scarcity compounds: it strains grids, fallows farmland, erodes political legitimacy, and provokes zero-sum battles.
When you’re at the base of Mt. Maslow’s Hierarchy, you don’t wait for the upper levels to get their act together. Fortunately, the Southwest still has choices, and the capital and stability to act on them. As we see it, the American Southwest has two options: (A) to choose the harder path and build at the scale of the problem (our preference: a solar + storage + desalination megaproject), or (B) to retreat into further rationing. As we wrote early last year: scarcity, defeatism, and managed decline are a choice. Iran has run out of alternatives. The Southwest hasn’t — at least, not yet.