Civilizational Drought: A Missing Category in the Understanding of Iran's Water Crisis

[NNadir]

A free to read "viewpoint" article on a country which felonious fascists feel free to bomb is here:

Civilizational Drought: A Missing Category in the Understanding of Iran’s Water Crisis Mostafa Hadei and Philip K. Hopke Environmental Science & Technology 2025 59 (27), 13529-13531

Drought is a multifaceted environmental challenge, typically categorized into five main types depending on its impact. Meteorological drought occurs when rainfall is below average over a period. Agricultural drought involves insufficient soil moisture for crop and livestock production. Hydrological drought refers to reduced water levels in water bodies, usually following prolonged dry periods. Socioeconomic drought reflects broader consequences like damage to employment, food security, public health, and the economy. Some also identify ecological drought, involving long-term degradation of ecosystems such as forests and wetlands. (1) While useful, these categories only capture part of the issue. In Iran, drought has become a systemic crisis, requiring a more integrated perspective that reflects its deeper societal impacts.

Iran is facing one of the most severe water crises in its modern history. Average annual precipitation has dropped to less than 250 mm. (2) Surface water bodies have declined sharply. Lake Urmia, once the largest saltwater lake in the Middle East, has lost more than 90% of its surface area since the 1990s. Heavy reliance on groundwater has caused serious depletion, with more than 70 km³ lost from 2002 to 2015, and unsustainable extraction reported across 77% of Iran’s land area. (3) This depletion has led to depleted wells, saline water, and widespread land subsidence. Parts of Tehran, Isfahan, and Kerman provinces exhibit the highest subsidence rates in the Middle East, exceeding 25 cm annually. (4)

Agriculture consumes more than 90% of Iran’s water, mainly through inefficient flood irrigation and cultivation of water-intensive crops. As a result, water scarcity has reached crisis levels. More than 300 cities and 8000 villages face water stress, with 500 villages reliant on tanker trucks. (5) In spring 2025, Tehran’s dam storage fell below 30%, with some reservoirs dropping to 6%, triggering warnings of water rationing. (6)

Water scarcity in Iran has intensified tensions, especially in central regions. Protests in areas like Isfahan, Khuzestan, and Sistan and Baluchistan driven by mismanagement and interprovincial disputes have sometimes led to arrests or fatalities. These conflicts reflect a long-term crisis rooted in chronic water decline, outdated infrastructure, inefficient agriculture, and unreformed water policies...

It's short, and easy to read the rest for free, if one is interested. If one is not interested, well, so be it.

This is, of course, a human rights issue, although there are people who deny the humanity of Iranians.

One of my critics here, a not very bright critic IMO, who wanted me to believe the world is awash in indium for solar cells - he, she or they seem not to come here anymore, and I couldn't care less - remarked, accurately I think, of me that when one has a hammer, every problem is a nail. The application of this cliche with respect to me of course is that I believe, and will not be dissuaded in during the remainder of my overly long life, that the only acceptable form of primary energy is nuclear energy.

The Persian Gulf is surely damaged by its years of oil traffic and oil wars. An avenue for desalination by achieving, at high very high temperatures, is the application of heating saline water to supercritical temperatures, during which a phase separation occurs since salts are not soluble in supercritical water. I discussed this some years back with respect to restoring California's destroyed bodies of water like Lake Owens and many other destroyed bodies of water in that state:

The Energy Required to Supply California's Water with Zero Discharge Supercritical Desalination.

In that post I referred to the phase diagram of saline water, which for convenience, I reproduce here:

I discussed some issues with supercritical water in a relatively recent previous post in this space: Experimental Supercritical (Sea)Water Oxidation of Microplastics To Yield Hydrogen and Other Gases.

At that time, it slipped my mind that I had in my files a paper that had a very nice representation of the three dimensional phase diagram, not of supercritical seawater, but the closely related sodium chloride water system. Here it is:



The caption:

Fig. 1. Phase diagram of H2O–NaCl in temperature–pressure–composition coordinates.

The source: Thomas Driesner, Christoph A. Heinrich, The system H2O–NaCl. Part I: Correlation formulae for phase relations in temperature–pressure–composition space from 0 to 1000°C, 0 to 5000bar, and 0 to 1 XNaCl, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, Volume 71, Issue 20, 2007, Pages 4880-4901.

Heating seawater to these temperatures under this much pressure obviously requires energy.

The effect of raising water in the Persian Gulf to supercritical temperatures would be to oxidize all petroleum contaminants in that body of water to hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide, in other words, to slowly clean that body of water up.

It is extremely unlikely - almost to the point of absurdity - to suggest that this will happen: As my life winds down, I see that the triumph of ignorance in our times precludes, I think, a "safe landing" for humanity, humanity being a species which includes Iranians. Nevertheless it is conceivable, even feasible, to do this, at least from an engineering perspective, if not from a political perspective, politics have now become entirely devoid of an ethical foundation.

In a "civilizational" setting, on a planetary scale, there is a profound drought of ethics.

Thus the following escapes us:

Iranians, like all human beings, have a right to nuclear energy.

Have a nice day.