by Dr. James M. Dorsey
Concern about environmental degradation and its potential political fallout goes beyond fear that it could facilitate interference by external powers.
Houz Soltan (Salt Lake) in Qom province, 85 km south of Tehran, Iran. Photo by Mostafameraji via Wikimedia Commons
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 818, May 1, 2018
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
Iranian leaders are struggling, three months after anti-government
protests swept the Islamic Republic, to ensure that environmental issues
that helped spark a popular uprising in Syria in 2011 leading to a
brutal civil war don’t threaten the clergy’s grip on power.
Like Syria, Iran has been suffering a drought that has affected much of the country for more than a decade, with precipitation dropping
to its lowest level in half a century. Environmental concerns have
figured prominently in protests in recent years, often in regions
populated by ethnic minorities like Azeris and Iranian Arabs.
Unrest among ethnic minorities, who account for
almost half of Iran’s population, have taken on added significance of
late. Iran has reason to fear both Saudi Arabia’s activist crown prince,
Muhammad bin Salman, and US President Donald Trump, whose antipathy
towards the Islamic Republic has been bolstered by the appointment of
hardliner John Bolton as his national security advisor.
Bolton has called for regime change in Iran,
aligning himself with a controversial exile opposition group, while
Prince Muhammad is believed to have tacitly endorsed the stirring up of
unrest among Iran’s ethnic minorities even if he has yet to decide
whether to adopt subversion as a policy. Iran has repeatedly accused
Saudi Arabia in the past year of supplying weapons and explosives to
restive groups like the Baluch and the Kurds.
Yet, concern about environmental degradation and
its potential political fallout goes beyond fear that it could
facilitate interference by external powers. Demonstrators in the
province of Isfahan last month clashed with security forces after they
took to the streets to protest water shortages. The protest occurred some three months after Iran was wracked by weeks of anti-government demonstrations.
The protest was the latest in a series of expressions of discontent. Anger at plans in 2013 to divert water from Isfahan province sparked clashes with police. The Isfahan Chamber of Commerce reported
a year later that the drying out of the Zayandeh Roud river basin had
deprived some 2 million farmers – 40% of the basin’s local population –
of their income.
“Over 90% of (Iran’s) population and economic
production are located in areas of high or very high water stress. This
is two to three times the global average in percentage terms, and, in
absolute numbers, it represents more people and more production at risk
than any other country in the Middle East and North Africa,” Al-Monitor quoted Claudia Sadoff, director general of the Sri Lanka-based International Water Management Institute, as saying.
A panel of retired US military officers noted
in December that “since the 1979 revolution, the per capita quantity of
Iran’s renewable water supplies has dropped by more than half, to a
level commonly associated with the benchmark for water stress. Even more
troubling, in large swaths of the country, demand for fresh water
exceeds supply a third of the year. Fourteen years of drought have
contributed to the problem, as has poor resource management, including
inefficient irrigation techniques, decentralized water management,
subsidies for water-intensive crops like wheat, and dam building. As a
result, parts of the country are experiencing unrest related to water
stress.”
By identifying water as one of the country’s
foremost problems, the government recognized that mismanagement leading
to acute water shortages risks becoming a symbol of its inability to
efficiently deliver public goods and services.
The government has sought to tackle the issue by
promoting reduced water consumption and water conservation, halting
construction of dams, combatting evaporation by building underground
water distribution networks, introducing water meters in agriculture,
encouraging farmers to opt for less water-intensive crops, multiplying
the number of treatment plants, and looking at desalination as a way of
increasing supply.
With agriculture the main culprit in Iran’s
inefficient use of water, Iranian officials fear that the crisis will
accelerate migration from the countryside to urban centers incapable of
catering to the migrants and, in turn, increase popular discontent.
A US study suggested
in 2015 that decades of unsustainable agricultural policies in Syria;
drought in the northeastern agricultural heartland of the country;
economic reforms that eliminated food and fuel subsidies; significant
population growth; and failure to adopt policies that mitigate climate
change exacerbated grievances about unemployment, corruption, and
inequality that exploded in 2011 in anti-government protests in Syria.
The Syrian government’s determination to crush the
protest rather than engage with the protesters sparked the country’s
devastating war, currently the world’s deadliest conflict.
“We’re not arguing that the drought, or even
human-induced climate change, caused the uprising. What we are saying is
that the long-term trend, of less rainfall and warmer temperatures in
the region, was a contributing factor, because it made the drought so
much more severe.” said Colin Kelley, one the study’s authors.
“The uprising has…to do with the government’s
failure to respond to the drought, and with broader feelings of
discontent in rural areas, and the growing gap between rich and poor,
and urban and rural areas during the 2000s, than with the drought
itself,” added Middle East water expert Francesca de Chatel.
Adopting a different emphasis, de Chatel argued
that demonstrations in Syria, despite the drought, would not have
erupted without the wave of protests that by then had already swept the
presidents of Tunisia and Egypt and that subsequently toppled the
leaders of Libya and Yemen.
She asserted further that the protest
movement-turned-war in Syria would not “have persisted without input and
support from organized groups in Syria who had been planning for this
moment for years and certainly since before 2006 or the start of the
drought.”
For Iranian leaders, the threat is real irrespective of the difference in emphasis between Kelly and de Chatel. Former Iranian agriculture minister Issa Kalantari warned
in 2015 that left unresolved, the water crisis would force 50 million
Iranians to migrate within the next 25 years. In other words, the
environmental crisis that drives migration and unemployment and fuels
discontent risks political upheaval.
Similarly, multiple groups and external powers
have for years contemplated regime change in Tehran. The issues that
were at the core of the initial protests in Syria in 2011 –
unemployment, corruption, and inequality – were at the heart of Iranian
anti-government demonstrations in December and January.
Despite a renewed focus on the water crisis, the
government’s Achilles Heel could prove to be its tendency to shoot the
messenger. Environmentalists increasingly find themselves in the firing
line.
In January, authorities arrested Kavous Seyed-Emami,
a dual Iranian-Canadian national who directed the Persian Wildlife
Heritage Foundation, as well as six other environmentalists. It
asserted two weeks later that Seyed-Emami had committed suicide in jail
after confessing to being a spy for the US and Israel.
Three more environmentalists were arrested a month later, and Seyed-Emami’s wife was prevented from leaving Iran.
State TV subsequently reported that Seyed-Emami
and his colleagues had told Iran’s enemies that the country could no
longer maintain domestic agriculture production because of water
shortages, and needed to import food.
Said Saeed Leylaz,
a Tehran-based economist and political analyst: “Public opinion has
become sensitized to environmental issues. So the government may see the
organizations and institutions who work on environmental issues as
problematic.”
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/iran-environmental-crisis/
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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