September 23, 2022
A senior government official working on the program to rescue Lake Urumiyeh says the lake will soon cease to exist if rescue efforts are not prioritized over the needs of farmers.
The surface area of the lake is now down by 80 percent from the mid-1990s and the water volume is down 95 percent.
“If the water quotas are not delivered and the approved plans are not fully carried out, the lake will definitely dry up and there will be no hope of its recovery,” the head of the environment department’s wetlands unit, Arezoo Ashrafizadeh, told the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) September 6.
She said the lake, which appeared to be recovering just a few years ago, is now in rapid decline and is actually two separated lakes with a total surface area of just 20 percent of what it was three decades ago.
“According to the law, the Energy Ministry is obliged to provide the environmental water needs of Lake Urumiyeh,” she said. “But the lake has not received its water entitlement due to a decrease in rainfall, among other reasons.”
Ashrafizadeh said there needed to be a halt to all new dam construction and measures taken to “limit agricultural activities” if the lake is to be restored.
The lake covered 5,200 square kilometers in 1995, when it started shrinking. The UN Environment Program said the decline resulted from a combination of rising temperatures, reduced rainfall, dam-building and over-farming.
In 2014, the government became concerned when the surface area was down to 1,300 square kilometers. The rescue efforts showed some results, with the surface area rising to 2,300 square kilometers in 2017. But the last year has seen shrinkage return at an alarming rate and the lake is now down to 1,000 square kilometers or smaller than it was when the rescue effort was launched.
Ashrafizadeh said the lake “has not yet completely dried up, but its northern and southern parts have been separated and only about 1,000 square kilometers (400 square miles) of the lake remain,” a mere one-fifth of its historic size. Beyond surface area, the decline in the water volume of the lake has been even more dramatic; the lake now holds only about 5 percent as much water as in 1995.
The shrinkage of the lake comes just as Iran was planning to inaugurate a 40-kilometer (25-mile) tunnel to bring a huge volume of water under a mountain from a dam near the Iraqi border to Lake Urumiyeh. But a few weeks ago, Karim Sheybani Yekta, the head of the company building the tunnel, said that, although the tunnel project had been completed, deep cracks had appeared in its walls that make it unusable until the cracks are fixed. He didn’t estimate how long that would take—or even if the tunnel was repairable.
While climate change has definitely aggravated the damage to the lake, the main cause of its decline has been the diversion of water from rivers flowing into the lake for use by farmers in the region. All 21 permanent rivers flowing into the lake have been dammed in recent decades.
As water is diverted and the salt lake shrinks, more salt piles up on the dried lake bed. Winds then carry salt onto agricultural fields, limiting production.
But Poolad Karimi, a former associate professor of water and agriculture at the Delft Institute in the Netherlands, said that even if the tunnel became operative, the lake would still not be rescued. He predicted, “Demand will just increase to meet supply.” He said the government had to work with the public, especially the farmers, to change behavior and reduce consumption. He said the core problem is decades of over-development around Lake Urumiyeh.
The Rohani Administration began a rescue plan for Lake Urumiyeh in 2014. The government said it has devoted 150 trillion rials to the LURP—Lake Urumiyeh Restoration Program—since then. That would be a half billion dollars at the current exchange rate, but since much of that money was spent when the exchange rate was more favorable, the actual value is much, much higher than $500 million.
LURP started by trying to work with farmers and convinced many to stop growing crops like watermelons that gulp up huge quantities of water. LURP also convinced many farmers to irrigate at night, when less water would evaporate and more would seep into the ground.
A study done by two Iranian researchers at the University of Miami concluded that the decline of the lake is 31 percent due to natural factors, such as reduced rainfall and hotter temperatures that lead to more evaporation. But human intervention—chiefly the diversion of water to farms—accounts for 69 percent of the lake’s decline, they concluded.
