Nazar Sarani’s village in southeast Iran was once an island. It is now a desert, a casualty of the country’s worsening water crisis.
“We live in the dust,” the 54-year-old cattle herder said of his home in the once exceptional biosphere of Lake Hamun, a wetland of varied flora and fauna, which is now nothing but sand-baked earth.
Climate change, with less rainfall each year, is blamed, but so too is human error and government mismanagement.
Iran’s reservoirs are only 40 percent full according to official figures, and nine cities, including the capital Tehran, are threatened with water restrictions after dry winters.
The situation is more critical in Sistan and Baluchestan Province, the most dangerous area in Iran, where a Sunni minority is centered in towns and villages that border Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Only 15 years ago, Hamun was the seventh largest wetland in the world, straddling 4,000km2 between Iran and Afghanistan, with water rolling in from the latter’s Helmand river.
However, with dams since built in Afghanistan, as well as other blocked pathways holding back the source of Hamun’s diversity, the local economy has collapsed.
About 3,000 families whose lifeline was fishing have left and young people head to other provinces for work.
Iranian Vice President Massoumeh Ebtekar, who is responsible for the environment, has said efforts are being made to protect Iran’s water rights that will see it flow back across the border.
The government is also working with the UN, although the challenges seem immense.
“The whole region is becoming warmer and drier,” UN Development Programme representative in Iran Gary Lewis said, calling for the Iranian and Afghan governments at the highest level to tackle it.
“The situation is unsustainable,” he added, noting climate change, but naming water mismanagement as the main problem.
While Afghanistan is often blamed for the water shortage, its ambassador to Tehran, Nassir Ahmad-Nour, said it was wrong to view a country at war since 1979 as a culprit.
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