Perhaps if they had put more resources toward maintaining their water infrastructure instead of spending on their nuclear arms ambitions, funding Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, etc., they might not have had this problem.
Governments like all institutions are able to do many things at once. Connecting their water problems to the issues you list is essentially a non sequitur absent specific evidence of either/or policy choices.
Governments have finite amounts of money. Both of these things (water infrastructure and fighting proxy wars) are capital intensive projects. Its reasonable to conclude less money spent on one would allow more money spent on another.
Even without that factor, Attention does matter. Governments can do multiple things, but in more dictatorial regimes, doing things well often require prioritization at the top, and there is a limited number of things the top can prioritize. Its one of the main failings of dictatorships in general: the top is afraid to appoint too competent middle management lest they rise up, so everything becomes very top down managed.
Additionally some of the issues causing this seem to be related to corruption in their military, like diverting water in unsustainable ways to support farming projects that have ties to people well connected to irgc. (To be fair, i dont know how true that is, i dont have a good source for that)
You can trace all their problems back to the 1979 Islamic revolution. If they would have simply kept the Shah as the ruler and stayed a client state to Britain, they wouldn't need to fund any of these militants, and would probably be a friend to western countries.
Its been 46 years, there have been opportunities for peace along the way if they wanted it. It would have required compromises though.
Iran's not war not peace policy is an expensive one, both directly and indirectly (e.g. turning them into a parriah state). In the end it seems like its also been largely ineffective. Instead of keeping them out of war, proxies like Hamas ended up drawing them into one, and it ended up being a pretty one sided war not in their favour. Although i suppose prior to that point it was yielding geopolitical gains.
This is an out of date take. Not long after the fracking boom that began in the mid 2000's, The US is now by far the world's largest oil producer. We used to produce less oil than Saudi Arabia, now we produce 66% more. We produce 4x the oil that Iran does. Oil is just not the same geopolitical force that it was in the 80's to 2010.
So what you’re saying is if they stayed quiet and supplicant to the British while they drained their oil resources while the extreme elites made all the money, everything would be okay? The Islamic revolution was a populist revolution, supported by the vast majority of the country because their lives were shit.
You gonna say the same about the consequence of events like Hurricane Katrina? Couple of less nukes, military contracts or whatever and you could have prevented the disaster.
Someone has to counter the saudis, Israelis etc. the longer this Palestinian conflict goes on the more it seems like there needs to be at least some sort of opposition to their genocide.
I find Iran to be a truly baffling civilization. Iranians are so educated and orderly, but the country punches so below its weight class in terms of prosperity.
Geographically speaking, over 80% of Iran’s land is classified as arid or semi-arid, and it is likely to face over 5°C of warming by the end of the century: the impacts of climate change will likely be more severe in Iran than the regional average. The region suffers from extreme weather including both droughts and flooding, seismic activity in the form tectonic uplift, particularly near the Makran coast, and constant attacks: economic attack by sanction, cyber attack on energy infrastructure, and lately even kinetic attack from neighbors. The fact that the regime hasn’t collapsed is a testament to Persian, Iranian and Islamic culture, and I hope its people find ways to prosper when the deck is so stacked against them.
This is a disgusting comment. There exists no parallel here. The nazis engaged in a systematic, colossal campaign to exterminate as many Jewish people as possible. You are saying that this is somehow equivalent to Israel simply existing. Iran became hostile to Israel and to the US in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution.
Also, the US entered WWII because of Pearl Harbor, and engaged in a normal war against the Axis. Iran engages in terrorism by financing and arming terrorist groups that perform terrorist attacks on civilians. The US action in WWII defeated the nazis. The actions of the Iranian dictatorship caused deaths and terrors targeted at civilians in other countries and destroyed the lives of its own people in Iran.
> This is a disgusting comment. There exists no parallel here.
What's disgusting is the behavior of Israelis that makes the vast majority of people credibly compare them to nazis. There is an ongoing ICJ trial about whether they are committing a genocide, and most of the international genocide scholars (including jewish and israeli scholars) have given their affirmative opinion on that.
The nazis engaged in a systematic, colossal campaign to exterminate as many Jewish people as possible, with a total of 6 million Jewish people murdered. They prioritized the killing of Jewish people, sometimes even over war objectives (as evidenced by letters where trains were used to facilitate the murder of Jewish people instead of transporting war supplies). Do you think Israel engaged in this kind of campaign to kill as many people as possible of any ethnicity?
The Gaza population has been increasing and almost doubled since Israel ceded the territory in 2005. Israel seeks to minimize civilian casualties when hitting valid military targets. Israel announces beforehand where targets will be hit, even though this obviously gives advantages to the enemy. Israel even just cancels their attacks if the civilian casualties would be too high. The ratio of civilians-by-combatants casualties in the Gaza war has been much lower than other wars in the urban environment.
No, he's speaking the truth. Israel is the successor to 1930-45 Germany, in every conceivable way.
From inflicting war on everyone (from before its inception in 48, to now) for lebensraum (greater israel),
to the kind of apartheid that old Afrikaners couldn't even dream about (as attested to Nelson Mandela & Bishop Desmond Tutu, who knew a thing or two about SA apartheid),
all the way to outright Holocaust in a full blown extermination camp (Gaza).
There's nothing left to argue. Iran, for all its faults, is one of the few entities which is standing against that. And for that, the past vilified them, the present damn them, but the future will applaud them.
> all the way to outright Holocaust in a full blown extermination camp (Gaza).
Gaza is an extermination camp? The Gaza population has been increasing and almost doubled since Israel ceded the territory in 2005. Israel seeks to minimize civilian casualties when hitting valid military targets. Israel announces beforehand where targets will be hit, even though this obviously gives advantages to the enemy. Israel even just cancels their attacks if the civilian casualties would be too high. The ratio of civilians-by-combatants casualties in the Gaza war has been much lower than other wars in the urban environment. Do you think the Nazi extermination camps were like that?
Iran isn’t a breadbasket exactly, but it has more arable land per person than Germany, Italy, the UK, or Ireland. And vastly more than Japan. It’s relatively temperate now—future warming doesn’t explain its current situation. On top of all that, it has oil! In 1980, just after the revolution, Iran had a PPP GDP per capita above Taiwan, China, and South Korea. And only modestly behind Poland. Today those countries are far ahead. Same for Thailand, Malaysia, and Turkey.
The economic sanctions are a symptom not the cause.
It's nominal GDP per capita was above Taiwan, Turkiye, South Korea, and all of Eastern Europe.
If the stuff that happened to Iran in our timeline didn't happened in the 1980s-2000s, it probably could have seen an economic boom comparable to what SK and Taiwan saw in the 1990s - especially becuase the leadership in 1980s South Korea and Taiwan were equally as authoritarian as that in Iran back then.
Other similar losers from that era were the DRC, Syria (before the civil war it was roughly on par with Turkiye), the Ivory Coast (it was France's premier financial hub in Franafrique before the civil war), and Pakistan (it's GDP per capita was significantly above China's until the 1990s, and Pakistani advisors helped industrialize significant portions of the Gulf).
I completely agree with you. We who wish well on Iranians can only hope the situation is speedily rectified and the regime will finally fall, ending the oppression, want, war and poverty they have inflicted on so many millions of people both within and without their borders.
Almost everything you’ve described, except for natural disasters, is an own goal. There’s literally no need for the country to be poor and on the brink of collapse. They are doing it to themselves.
Their government spends itself into poverty fighting proxy wars against Israel both directly and indirectly through sanctions. It’s a theocracy so economics is not the most important thing to their leaders.
It's hard to manage a water supply and economy in Tehran when your top minds are busy running proxy wars in Lebanon and Iraq and funding or supporting ones in Syria, Yemen, and Gaza [1, 2].
It's sad to such a great people subjugated by their government.
Dams blocking the inflow to Lake Urmia that almost dried up nowadays were built by the Shah, for example. Man-made environmental damage and corruption aren't new by any measure, as well as unstable water levels and shortages in arid zones. See e.g. Aral Sea which fluctuated in the range of dozens of meters over centuries before finally drying up, which was enough to establish and subsequently abandon multiple settlements on the lake bed during the Mongol Empire.
It is a crying shame and the Iranians deserve better. At the moment 16 million people may find themselves without water in the near future. I'm lost for words.
If one positive thing could be found in this situation it might finally be the thing that brings down the regime. I think it's fair to say this year has been an annus horribilis for them.
They will still be empty eventually. It might still become a stable situation though. If you look at pictures from North Korea the only person who doesn't look malnourished is Kim Jong Un. Otoh water is different from food. Also it's the middle east. They might have to cut back on their aggression but their antagonists (who by now is literally everyone) won't.
It's an Islamic theocracy with nuclear as well as regional hegemonic ambitions; what about the corresponding impoverishment of its citizens is "baffling" to you?
Hacker News crowd does its emotional outrage voting but the similarities are uncanny: Khomeini's first famous speech when he got back was promising free water, electricity, and busses.
They are delivering on the free water promise by setting Qty=0.
One of the reasons that Iran's regime has failed to prepare for global climate is that fundamental Islam rejects modern science because it instead supports supernaturalism in many areas.
I cannot imagine the logistical nightmare of evacuating a metro area with 16 million people. Where do they go? Where has sufficient water to slake the thirst of that many?
it would be one of the largest sudden migrations of people in history.
to put this in perspective, 13M people fled during the Syrian Civil War. 5.7M people fled Ukraine. The evacuation of New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina was 1.2M people.
Never under estimate China. AP News says China expected 270M cross region trips during the Chinese new year this year. Likely with millions out of Beijing alone by itself for this yearly event over 2 weeks.
That's not really permanent displacement though. A refugee crisis due to water scarcity looks a lot different than going home for a known major holiday for a set amount of time.
That's also half way across the world to a country that is not exactly on friendly terms with Iran (not as unfriendly as say usa is, but still not geopolitical friends)
Pipes to quench a 10-million city through 100 kms of mountains (140km by road), going up 2 kms from the sea level? That's more than Israel's max distance from the sea (and it's mostly flat).
I'm ignorant but aren't oil pipelines much longer? They don't need to traverse mountain ranges but still. Either way i can't imagine such a project would be possible in an emergency time scale without the combined assistance of the US, Israel (desalination experts) and China. i know absolutely nothing about these things, so i don't know if it's even theoretically possible with their help.
Apparently the highest oil pipeline throughput (Druzhba) is 1.4 million barrels per day, which amounts to some 2000 liters per second. That would be 20 liters/person/day - kinda maybe enough to move the needle, but not quite.
Building this sort of pipeline today is about $1-2M per km on flat land. I'm not aware of comparable pipelines in the mountains.
Then, desalination requires energy, and Iran already faces blackouts here and there, there just isn't much spare capacity.
I think on a similar scale would be the Chinese South–North Water Transfer Project , which has taken several decades to eventually move 44.8 cubic km of fresh water via canls/aqueducts etc through some mountanious terrain.
Or the undground Great Man-Made River Project of Libya moving 6.5 million cubic meters over 2,820 km.
Main issue ther though is the first is from already present freshwater sources and the latter from underground aquifers. With both having been done over multilpe decades to reach that capacity. Finding the water to move would be the main challenge, een though the Caspian is less saline than ocean water - there are probably water usage agreemets with the neighbourign countries preventing a massive undertaking of such size.
Perhaps if they had put more resources toward maintaining their water infrastructure instead of spending on their nuclear arms ambitions, funding Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, etc., they might not have had this problem.
Governments like all institutions are able to do many things at once. Connecting their water problems to the issues you list is essentially a non sequitur absent specific evidence of either/or policy choices.
Governments have finite amounts of money. Both of these things (water infrastructure and fighting proxy wars) are capital intensive projects. Its reasonable to conclude less money spent on one would allow more money spent on another.
Even without that factor, Attention does matter. Governments can do multiple things, but in more dictatorial regimes, doing things well often require prioritization at the top, and there is a limited number of things the top can prioritize. Its one of the main failings of dictatorships in general: the top is afraid to appoint too competent middle management lest they rise up, so everything becomes very top down managed.
Additionally some of the issues causing this seem to be related to corruption in their military, like diverting water in unsustainable ways to support farming projects that have ties to people well connected to irgc. (To be fair, i dont know how true that is, i dont have a good source for that)
On the other hand, one cost effective way of desalinating sea water is to use the waste heat from a nuclear power station.
You can trace all their problems back to the 1979 Islamic revolution. If they would have simply kept the Shah as the ruler and stayed a client state to Britain, they wouldn't need to fund any of these militants, and would probably be a friend to western countries.
Its been 46 years, there have been opportunities for peace along the way if they wanted it. It would have required compromises though.
Iran's not war not peace policy is an expensive one, both directly and indirectly (e.g. turning them into a parriah state). In the end it seems like its also been largely ineffective. Instead of keeping them out of war, proxies like Hamas ended up drawing them into one, and it ended up being a pretty one sided war not in their favour. Although i suppose prior to that point it was yielding geopolitical gains.
You are never a friend of the Western countries [==the US] when you are an oil producer. You are their vassal or their foe. #oilCurse
This is an out of date take. Not long after the fracking boom that began in the mid 2000's, The US is now by far the world's largest oil producer. We used to produce less oil than Saudi Arabia, now we produce 66% more. We produce 4x the oil that Iran does. Oil is just not the same geopolitical force that it was in the 80's to 2010.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-production-by-country...
Which one is Norway?
Good question.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/norway-seeks-deeper-sec...
And if my ancient ancestor did not kill that fly we will be travelling to stars now. And why ffs one country should obey the other?
So what you’re saying is if they stayed quiet and supplicant to the British while they drained their oil resources while the extreme elites made all the money, everything would be okay? The Islamic revolution was a populist revolution, supported by the vast majority of the country because their lives were shit.
You gonna say the same about the consequence of events like Hurricane Katrina? Couple of less nukes, military contracts or whatever and you could have prevented the disaster.
How do you prevent a hurricane? The failures of responding to the disaster were all at the state/local level.
The failures were not all at the state/local level. The feds also had many issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_government_re...
You do not prevent hurricane. But you can prevent fucked up dams, corralling people in stadiums etc. etc.
Anyways my point was not really about hurricane.
Someone has to counter the saudis, Israelis etc. the longer this Palestinian conflict goes on the more it seems like there needs to be at least some sort of opposition to their genocide.
I find Iran to be a truly baffling civilization. Iranians are so educated and orderly, but the country punches so below its weight class in terms of prosperity.
Geographically speaking, over 80% of Iran’s land is classified as arid or semi-arid, and it is likely to face over 5°C of warming by the end of the century: the impacts of climate change will likely be more severe in Iran than the regional average. The region suffers from extreme weather including both droughts and flooding, seismic activity in the form tectonic uplift, particularly near the Makran coast, and constant attacks: economic attack by sanction, cyber attack on energy infrastructure, and lately even kinetic attack from neighbors. The fact that the regime hasn’t collapsed is a testament to Persian, Iranian and Islamic culture, and I hope its people find ways to prosper when the deck is so stacked against them.
"economic attack by sanction, cyber attack on energy infrastructure, and lately even kinetic attack from neighbors."
They could just stop being at war with Israel any time, it is a pointless choice.
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Germans committing genocide was not why the US entered the war, though.
This is a disgusting comment. There exists no parallel here. The nazis engaged in a systematic, colossal campaign to exterminate as many Jewish people as possible. You are saying that this is somehow equivalent to Israel simply existing. Iran became hostile to Israel and to the US in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution.
Also, the US entered WWII because of Pearl Harbor, and engaged in a normal war against the Axis. Iran engages in terrorism by financing and arming terrorist groups that perform terrorist attacks on civilians. The US action in WWII defeated the nazis. The actions of the Iranian dictatorship caused deaths and terrors targeted at civilians in other countries and destroyed the lives of its own people in Iran.
> This is a disgusting comment. There exists no parallel here.
What's disgusting is the behavior of Israelis that makes the vast majority of people credibly compare them to nazis. There is an ongoing ICJ trial about whether they are committing a genocide, and most of the international genocide scholars (including jewish and israeli scholars) have given their affirmative opinion on that.
The nazis engaged in a systematic, colossal campaign to exterminate as many Jewish people as possible, with a total of 6 million Jewish people murdered. They prioritized the killing of Jewish people, sometimes even over war objectives (as evidenced by letters where trains were used to facilitate the murder of Jewish people instead of transporting war supplies). Do you think Israel engaged in this kind of campaign to kill as many people as possible of any ethnicity?
The Gaza population has been increasing and almost doubled since Israel ceded the territory in 2005. Israel seeks to minimize civilian casualties when hitting valid military targets. Israel announces beforehand where targets will be hit, even though this obviously gives advantages to the enemy. Israel even just cancels their attacks if the civilian casualties would be too high. The ratio of civilians-by-combatants casualties in the Gaza war has been much lower than other wars in the urban environment.
No, he's speaking the truth. Israel is the successor to 1930-45 Germany, in every conceivable way.
From inflicting war on everyone (from before its inception in 48, to now) for lebensraum (greater israel),
to the kind of apartheid that old Afrikaners couldn't even dream about (as attested to Nelson Mandela & Bishop Desmond Tutu, who knew a thing or two about SA apartheid),
all the way to outright Holocaust in a full blown extermination camp (Gaza).
There's nothing left to argue. Iran, for all its faults, is one of the few entities which is standing against that. And for that, the past vilified them, the present damn them, but the future will applaud them.
> all the way to outright Holocaust in a full blown extermination camp (Gaza).
Gaza is an extermination camp? The Gaza population has been increasing and almost doubled since Israel ceded the territory in 2005. Israel seeks to minimize civilian casualties when hitting valid military targets. Israel announces beforehand where targets will be hit, even though this obviously gives advantages to the enemy. Israel even just cancels their attacks if the civilian casualties would be too high. The ratio of civilians-by-combatants casualties in the Gaza war has been much lower than other wars in the urban environment. Do you think the Nazi extermination camps were like that?
[dead]
The US entered WW2 because Pearl Harbor was attacked, not Germans committing genocide.
Iran isn’t a breadbasket exactly, but it has more arable land per person than Germany, Italy, the UK, or Ireland. And vastly more than Japan. It’s relatively temperate now—future warming doesn’t explain its current situation. On top of all that, it has oil! In 1980, just after the revolution, Iran had a PPP GDP per capita above Taiwan, China, and South Korea. And only modestly behind Poland. Today those countries are far ahead. Same for Thailand, Malaysia, and Turkey.
The economic sanctions are a symptom not the cause.
Not just PPP.
It's nominal GDP per capita was above Taiwan, Turkiye, South Korea, and all of Eastern Europe.
If the stuff that happened to Iran in our timeline didn't happened in the 1980s-2000s, it probably could have seen an economic boom comparable to what SK and Taiwan saw in the 1990s - especially becuase the leadership in 1980s South Korea and Taiwan were equally as authoritarian as that in Iran back then.
Other similar losers from that era were the DRC, Syria (before the civil war it was roughly on par with Turkiye), the Ivory Coast (it was France's premier financial hub in Franafrique before the civil war), and Pakistan (it's GDP per capita was significantly above China's until the 1990s, and Pakistani advisors helped industrialize significant portions of the Gulf).
All good points.
I completely agree with you. We who wish well on Iranians can only hope the situation is speedily rectified and the regime will finally fall, ending the oppression, want, war and poverty they have inflicted on so many millions of people both within and without their borders.
In the meantime i hope it rains.
Almost everything you’ve described, except for natural disasters, is an own goal. There’s literally no need for the country to be poor and on the brink of collapse. They are doing it to themselves.
Gee, I wonder what possibly could have happened over the last 50 or so years that might have damaged their prosperity.
Their government spends itself into poverty fighting proxy wars against Israel both directly and indirectly through sanctions. It’s a theocracy so economics is not the most important thing to their leaders.
Well it's the most heavily sanctioned country on earth...
Sanctions surely aren’t helping
The situation the article is about seems more to do with corruption and mismanagement than sanctions.
It's hard to manage a water supply and economy in Tehran when your top minds are busy running proxy wars in Lebanon and Iraq and funding or supporting ones in Syria, Yemen, and Gaza [1, 2].
It's sad to such a great people subjugated by their government.
1: https://www.cfr.org/article/irans-regional-armed-network 2: https://www.unitedagainstnucleariran.com/proxy-wars/map
Dams blocking the inflow to Lake Urmia that almost dried up nowadays were built by the Shah, for example. Man-made environmental damage and corruption aren't new by any measure, as well as unstable water levels and shortages in arid zones. See e.g. Aral Sea which fluctuated in the range of dozens of meters over centuries before finally drying up, which was enough to establish and subsequently abandon multiple settlements on the lake bed during the Mongol Empire.
True, but water desalination plants also exist and Iran has plenty of oil to power them.
Theocracy surely isn't helping
[dead]
I wonder what happened...
It is a crying shame and the Iranians deserve better. At the moment 16 million people may find themselves without water in the near future. I'm lost for words.
If one positive thing could be found in this situation it might finally be the thing that brings down the regime. I think it's fair to say this year has been an annus horribilis for them.
I suspect that the IRGC will be the last ones with empty canteens.
They will still be empty eventually. It might still become a stable situation though. If you look at pictures from North Korea the only person who doesn't look malnourished is Kim Jong Un. Otoh water is different from food. Also it's the middle east. They might have to cut back on their aggression but their antagonists (who by now is literally everyone) won't.
It's all British/American fault. /s
Sanctions will do that. Both soft and hard
> truly baffling
It's an Islamic theocracy with nuclear as well as regional hegemonic ambitions; what about the corresponding impoverishment of its citizens is "baffling" to you?
They are governed by Islamic fundamentalists ?
They were so ahead of their times compared to NYC they let Islamo-Marxists take over in 1979 and this is the result. Oh well...
You got down voted for this, but it gave me a chuckle. Some people have no sense of humour.
Maybe Tehran just needs to tax the locals an additional 2% so they can finally start delivering…
Hacker News crowd does its emotional outrage voting but the similarities are uncanny: Khomeini's first famous speech when he got back was promising free water, electricity, and busses.
They are delivering on the free water promise by setting Qty=0.
And there’s free electricity in Evin Prison too.
Sure it’s free when connected but they had scheduled blackouts over the summer in Tehran to make sure IRGC Bitcoin miners keep working.
Equality: everyone can have nothing!
The air quality is also atrocious, in line with other socialist states, along with the lack of laws against animal cruelty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_welfare_and_rights_in_I...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehran_water_shortage
"These (IRGC and government) privileged neighborhoods maintain numerous private swimming pools and spacious green spaces."
One of the reasons that Iran's regime has failed to prepare for global climate is that fundamental Islam rejects modern science because it instead supports supernaturalism in many areas.
I bet they fuel their missiles with praying power too!
FYI there is an 2 year old Asianometry video on this topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaEhNTpvEN8
I cannot imagine the logistical nightmare of evacuating a metro area with 16 million people. Where do they go? Where has sufficient water to slake the thirst of that many?
it would be one of the largest sudden migrations of people in history.
to put this in perspective, 13M people fled during the Syrian Civil War. 5.7M people fled Ukraine. The evacuation of New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina was 1.2M people.
Never under estimate China. AP News says China expected 270M cross region trips during the Chinese new year this year. Likely with millions out of Beijing alone by itself for this yearly event over 2 weeks.
That's not really permanent displacement though. A refugee crisis due to water scarcity looks a lot different than going home for a known major holiday for a set amount of time.
500 million people travel to varanasi in India for the Kumbh Mela.
.
That's also half way across the world to a country that is not exactly on friendly terms with Iran (not as unfriendly as say usa is, but still not geopolitical friends)
Iran isn't that far from the Caspian. Is it not possible to develop a desalination plant?
Nearby Israel has desalination plants that seem to be working out well.
Not in the course of the next few weeks.
This situation was avoidable but it required investment years ago. Kind of too late now.
Pipes to quench a 10-million city through 100 kms of mountains (140km by road), going up 2 kms from the sea level? That's more than Israel's max distance from the sea (and it's mostly flat).
I'm ignorant but aren't oil pipelines much longer? They don't need to traverse mountain ranges but still. Either way i can't imagine such a project would be possible in an emergency time scale without the combined assistance of the US, Israel (desalination experts) and China. i know absolutely nothing about these things, so i don't know if it's even theoretically possible with their help.
Apparently the highest oil pipeline throughput (Druzhba) is 1.4 million barrels per day, which amounts to some 2000 liters per second. That would be 20 liters/person/day - kinda maybe enough to move the needle, but not quite. Building this sort of pipeline today is about $1-2M per km on flat land. I'm not aware of comparable pipelines in the mountains.
Then, desalination requires energy, and Iran already faces blackouts here and there, there just isn't much spare capacity.
I think on a similar scale would be the Chinese South–North Water Transfer Project , which has taken several decades to eventually move 44.8 cubic km of fresh water via canls/aqueducts etc through some mountanious terrain.
Or the undground Great Man-Made River Project of Libya moving 6.5 million cubic meters over 2,820 km.
Main issue ther though is the first is from already present freshwater sources and the latter from underground aquifers. With both having been done over multilpe decades to reach that capacity. Finding the water to move would be the main challenge, een though the Caspian is less saline than ocean water - there are probably water usage agreemets with the neighbourign countries preventing a massive undertaking of such size.
> 2000 liters per second
Some people will try to blame EVs for environmental damage when we have this monstrosity.
EVs are charged to a degree by Russian natural gas fed by another pipeline (13% or EU gas now).
In a year, with massive sanctions, for this many people? No. Not a chance.
The BBC article spelled the dam's name wrong in their interactive image. It's Latyan Dam if anyone else wanted to look up more on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latyan_Dam https://maps.app.goo.gl/UzQrPMR4iHRdbsuP7
Edit: TIL there can be different translations/spellings of Persian to English
Well, the actual spelling is لتيان, so it comes down to how you choose to romanize it.
I had no idea Romanization of Perian was a thing. Thanks for sharing!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Persian
Is their geography able to emulate what Africa has done with off grid pumps?
they pumped out all aquifer. there are parts of city that sink at rate of 10" per year
I don't know whether Israel water technology can help in this situation? After all, Israel did a fairly good job irrigating their equally arid soil.
It's a pity that geopolitics -- specifically, Iran's desire to eliminate Israel -- is the reason why we couldn't test this out.