Drought, floods, and extreme weather have had devastating effects on Iran, forcing people to move internally, affecting one of the world’s largest populations of displaced people, and likely propelling emigration. More than 11 million people in Iran were affected by floods from 1980 to 2000. In recent years, tens of thousands of people annually—and as many as 520,000 amid devastating flash floods in 2019—have been displaced internally by natural disasters. In January, the government said that approximately 800,000 Iranians had been internally displaced due to issues related to climate change.
One of the most common disasters in Iran is floods. Flooding is a frequent natural hazard, causing significant damage to the environment and human lives. Records indicate an increase in flood losses from 17.2 to 132 million USD in the period between 1950 and 2000. In 2019 alone, flooding accounted for the death of 78 people around the country and caused over 1.1 billion USD in damage in Iran. It is important to note that Iran is prone to climate change effects, which contribute to an increase in disasters such as floods, storms, droughts, land subsidies, sinkholes, and forest fires. Overall, these disasters highlight the need for effective disaster risk reduction measures and improved management strategies which are seriously absent in government planning.
Climate change worsens the intensity and frequency of extreme weather conditions in arid and semi-arid regions as it leads to heavy rainfall, high temperatures, and longer periods of drought, certainly exposing these areas to greater flood damage in the future. The problem is further amplified by mismanagement of natural resources, lack of proper environmental protection plans, inappropriate land use, population growth, and human activities such as urbanization, economic development, and missing awareness.
In addition to climate change and human activity that cause widespread impacts on flooding, several unique conditions expose arid and semi-arid areas to severe flooding and unexpected flood damage. High diversity in climate, geography, geology, vegetation, and hydrology of arid and semi-arid areas poses difficulties for flood managers. Human and system-related challenges such as drought-based management and institutional frameworks have adverse effects on Floods Risk Management (FRM).
For some period of days, this year severe floods have ravaged the province of Sistan and Baluchistan, impacting the health and livelihoods of tens of thousands of residents. In early March, following days of relentless rainfall, distressing videos of widespread flooding in multiple counties and villages emerged, revealing the state of chaos caused by overflowing rivers and dams across the southeastern provinces.
Bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Sistan and Baluchistan province has a population of more than 3 million ethnically and religiously diverse people mostly living in rural areas. The province is also recorded as the poorest in the country having suffered through decades of economic, social, and environmental hardship.
The flooding in the Sistan and Baluchistan province has caused more than $40 million in damage so far, the province’s crisis management director, Majid Mohebbi, said. The losses have primarily affected roads, agricultural fields, and residential infrastructure. The full extent of the losses is still being assessed, he added, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).
Since February 27th of this year, persistent heavy rains have led to the overflow of four dams in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province, causing floods that have affected 110,000 people across 14 cities and 450 villages in the southern regions, mainly Dashtiari, Qasrqand, Nikshahr, and Chabahar cities.
Flooding is a regular occurrence throughout Iran and is not limited to the Sistan and Baluchistan province but many other provinces. In November, Iranian authorities reported floods in Golestan and Mazandaran in the north along the Caspian Sea, Khuzestan in the southwest, and other areas. There were also floods in the country in September, August, and June of 2023. Now, flood devastation has taken place in sixteen provinces with lots of casualties and economic loss.
The results of various flood investigators indicated that a wide range of factors affect the deaths and losses caused by floods including the categories of hazard-related features such as the country’s policies, management, economic, social, demographic, and physical factors.
Among all these, undoubtedly rapid response to rescue people from flooding can save many lives and prevent much of economic loss. However, historically the rescue efforts and governmental representation in flood hazards are non-existent, for photo ops or at best very minimal in Iran. Therefore, the damages are significant, and psychological trauma is much higher.
Among many factors that contribute to the devastation and loss in flooded areas, one is the speed of the flood, a factor that determines a flood’s impact on people. Sudden and fast-moving floods, defined as “flash floods,” are very dangerous to humans and livestock, so much so that some investigators focus only on flash floods, even though a rigorous criterion to separate flash floods from other floods does not exist.
Floods in small and steep basins are classified as flash floods; nevertheless, how small and how steep the basins must be are factors that depend on the local geomorphological and climatic framework. Flash floods are those related to short and intense precipitation events affecting small catchment areas over a short period.
The rapid onset of flash floods may surprise people, and hazards management teams, giving them a very short time to decide what to do. The rapidity of a flash flood restricts the anticipation time for emergency management personnel of an effective response and results in a short time for both warning and emergency procedure activation such as; road closures, rescues, and evacuations. Flash floods are very deadly most of the time and require up-to-date training and seasoned people. Non-flash floods can likewise be dangerous to human life, especially in densely populated areas where floods are primarily caused by tropical cyclone activity and monsoon rain.
Another important factor is the flood bed load, which in worst-case scenarios consists of huge debris, such as cars and trees, that communities experienced in Fars province and resulted in severe trauma, orthopedic injuries, and lacerations.
The impact of huge debris can cause trauma and weaken the strength of victims, cause fatalities, and promote drownings. A survey among people who survived those floods highlighted that “when you get stuck in a flood with debris, you may have a big stick to your body, which can break your bone or graze the grass and plant roots in the goblet and you cannot breathe!” Also, another factor that makes the situation more traumatic is the floodwater’s temperature, which may cause hypothermia and heart attacks, leading to death.
A significant number of studies recognize that flood risk causing death is higher in rural areas, especially in the case of Iran, the government is absent in most of the cases due to:
1- Lack of fast responding units for rescues, evacuations, and road closures;
2- Low population densities, which diminish the chances of receiving first aid from laypeople;
3- Lack of mitigating structures, such as bridges over low water crossings; and
4- The geographic location, often at headwater basins, which respond quickly to floods, providing less warning time.
Despite the numerous opportunities to enhance its water management policies, the government persistently adheres to the path of Iran’s “Water Mafia”—a non-official alliance that comprises the energy ministry, executives, academics, consulting engineers, influential contractors, and a cadre of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders overseeing the Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters in Iran.
Disturbingly, suppose this group opts to construct a dam like Gotvand, where a multimillion-ton mass of salt becomes a part of the reservoir. In that case, there seems to be no governing authority capable of halting their actions, despite many warnings about this possibility due to nearby saline geological formations.
Despite the evidence of human and environmental damages from expensive water management projects, it has been empirically proven that, in many regions of Iran, instead of nature-based solutions, dam constructions, and inter-basin water transfers are more favorable to government authorities. Iran’s Water Mafia consistently opposes projects prioritizing efficiency and cost-effectiveness, as these initiatives undermine their ability to extract commission money.
Some human activities such as burning fossil fuels have caused the production of greenhouse gases and global warming. Researchers predict that the rising temperature and changes in weather patterns will increase more in the future.
According to United Nations reports, the consequences of global warming are intense droughts, water scarcity, severe fires, rising sea levels, flooding, melting polar ice, catastrophic storms, declining biodiversity., etc.
In addition to environmental risks, climate change threatens public health, resulting in forced migrations as well as social and political problems. Climate change adaptation strategies could reduce the negative impacts and provide new opportunities to address them. However, the clerical regime has not only failed to make any efforts to decrease environmental calamities but also, with its policies against environmental protection and environmentalists, has significantly contributed to their degradation.
Anthropogenic climate change is causing a wide array of damaging impacts across the globe, such as sea-level rise, increased climate variability, and more frequent or intense droughts, floods, and wildfires. This is having increasingly severe social and economic consequences, especially in low and lower-middle-income nations which tend to be most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
Nature-based solutions (NBS) are approaches that work with and enhance nature to address societal challenges. They encompass a broad range of actions that protect, restore, or sustainably manage ecosystems including natural, semi-natural, or created to provide benefits to people, which at the heart of such activities are rangelands management, soil conservation, watershed management, etc.
NBS includes established approaches such as ecosystem-based adaptation (EBA), ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction, natural infrastructure, green and blue infrastructure, such as forest, sea, lakes, riparian, and other sorts of landscape restoration as well as the more recently coined “natural climate solutions”.
NBS harnesses a range of benefits that flow from healthy, biodiverse, and resilient natural systems. For example, they can support climate change adaptation through flood protection, air and water quality regulation, and urban cooling while contributing to climate change mitigation and sustaining or enhancing biodiversity. Indeed, a large part of the appeal of NBS is its potential to address multiple sustainable development goals simultaneously.
Natural climate variabilities, climate change, droughts, and floods have undeniable impacts on Iran’s environment and its water resources. Yet Iran’s environmental and water problems are indeed manmade, which is the product of decades of absolutely poor management and applied policies coupled with a lack of foresight, uncoordinated planning, and the wrong perception of development.
Drought is, perhaps, the most serious environmental issue facing the country. Water shortage in Iran is a government-created crisis that numerous former and in-office officials have spoken about due to IRGC’s massive dam construction, corruption, and mismanagement of scarce water resources. Iran has struggled with water shortages for decades and as of last year, around 97% of the country was experiencing drought conditions.
Decades of mismanagement, corruption, wrong policies, terrorism expenditure, and unsustainable economic plans of ruling clerics in Iran have exacerbated the internal and external degradation factors, and as a whole have worked to destroy the natural fabric of Iran.
Iran’s environmental crisis is intertwined with other socioeconomic crises. The salvation of such a crisis isn’t within the power of ruling clerics, nor the will of a corrupt, warmongering regime. So, Iranians have decided to bring down this regime in its entirety, which is an enemy of humanity, freedom, peace, security happiness, and the welfare of natural ecosystems. Now, which side must the free world stand on? You be the judge!
* Khalil Khani is an Environmental Specialist and a Human Rights activist. He holds a Ph.D. in Ecology, Botany, and Environmental Studies from Germany and has taught at the University of Tehran and the Hesse State University in Germany. He is also a Doctor of Medical Psychology from the United States.
