August 06, 2021
Kaveh Madani, a senior fellow at Yale University and the former deputy head of Iran’s Environmental Protection Agency, says Iran is now “essentially water bankrupt” and he primarily blames the Islamic Republic’s economic model.
In an interview with Microsoft News published July 24, Madani said: “The system is essentially water bankrupt. Water demand is far more than the available water. Iran has been using its water resources unsustainably. Khuzestan is just one of these places where the explosion eventually has appeared. People are saying that we have had enough and the environment is actually saying that it has had enough.”
Madani spent most of his career abroad but was brought back a few years ago by Issa Kalantari, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, to be his deputy. Madani was harassed and threatened by many in the regime and fled Iran after only a few months.
Madani was asked about the current protests in Khuzestan over water and pointed out that Khuzestan is one of the few parts of Iran that is not semi-arid.
He said that two years ago the province suffered from widespread flooding, “They had lots of damage, but the reservoirs got full. But people forgot that they have to conserve and use less water. And when I say people, it’s not really people, the government who allocates water to different uses — agriculture, domestic sector, industrial sector — and then they drain the reservoir. And now, there is no rain and no water is available for the farmers to irrigate their farms and cities are even suffering.”
Madani said, “Iran is a semi-arid area. Khuzestan province is an exception. It’s very wet. It has mountains in the north and the south. It has the Persian Gulf. But then you start putting reservoirs everywhere. You use the water for agriculture, don’t supply enough water to your wetlands, don’t supply enough water to the environment and the ecosystem. So, essentially, you are developing unsustainably.”
Madani laid the major blame on the Islamic Republic’s economic system. “This economic model, which only thinks about production and doesn’t think about the environment, is dysfunctional. This has been proven to us around the world. Iran must change its development model, must invest in the industrial and service sector and decrease the pressure on its natural environment if it wants to survive. This means diversifying the economy and making big reforms to the agricultural sector. And these are very, very painful surgeries that you can’t do, essentially, in systems where people are mad at you or have lost trust and faith in the government.”
He said, “You know, we are water bankrupt in many places. The system that we have is not sustainable right now. What we are seeing in Iran is a political crisis. It’s a social crisis. You cannot just take the environmental sector out and prescribe solutions for the environmental sector, disregarding all other governance and social issues.”
