Threshold Conversations: Water and the War in Iran with Kaveh Madani

[00:00] INTRO

AMY: As we release this episode in May of 2026, the United States has been at war with Iran for almost three months. In addition to the mounting civilian death toll, and the cascade of economic and political repercussions around the world, this war is taking place in a country that’s been wracked by drought and severe water scarcity. President Donald Trump has threatened to further destabilize Iran’s water system, floating the idea of bombing civilian infrastructure including dams, water treatment plants, and the electrical grid. 

Kaveh Madani grew up in Iran and he’s now an environmental scientist and the director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. Previously, he was the Deputy Head of the Department of Environment in his home country, and in that role he tried to implement ambitious water and climate policies. But in 2018, he left Iran during a government crackdown on conservation-minded scientists and activists, and he now lives in exile. I wanted to talk with Kaveh about his research on water scarcity — or as he calls it, water bankruptcy — and about how war can reinforce a brutal feedback loop between environmental degradation and political instability. 

MUSIC

Kaveh Madani, welcome to Threshold Conversations.

KAVEH: Thank you for having me.

AMY: If it's okay with you, I'd love to start with just a brief grounding in your personal story. I'm wondering if you could share an early memory related to water from your childhood growing up in Iran?

KAVEH: Yeah. My parents worked for the water sector. And I have a workaholic mom who, whom I blame for being a workaholic now. I'm just like her. But I had no siblings, and she was a working mother, so she had to take me to some missions across Iran. That was the era of, like, a lot of buildings and development. So I got to see some reservoirs, projects like that. And I think that the early exposure to water I think that's where I must have developed interest in this field.

AMY: Well, in November of last year, I remember seeing this really startling announcement from the Iranian regime that possibly the entire city of Tehran was going to need to be evacuated due to lack of water. Can you just give some background on this story of water crisis in Iran and water in the region more generally?

KAVEH: So water in Iran has a sad story, similar to many other places where the leaders, engineers and developers never understood or appreciated water as a limit to growth. So what we saw in Iran is very similar to what we saw in the US West. The focus is on overruling nature, and that means digging deeper wells, building more dams, transferring water from one location to another and continuing the development madness.

Iran is one of the richest countries of the Middle East when it comes to water availability, but still, the amount of water that the country, that large country, has is much less than the world average. So you either take that limit and understand and adapt to it and comply with it, or you face the problems that we are seeing today.

Tehran, my city where I was born and raised, is a city that has ski resorts around it. It's not the driest place on the planet. It's a four season city, like you get a lot of rain and precipitation in the fall and spring and in winters you get a lot of snow. But things have changed. You know, too much development. The heat island created around the city, and then climate change at the global level has shifted the patterns of precipitation and water availability. But on top of that, you have more than 50 million people in that metropolitan because people have kept coming to that place. And then the solution has been, let's find another water source for it. Let's transfer more water to it.

Let's build more and more reservoirs. So by doing so, you kind of put a Band-Aid on the problem. You don't address the root cause, which is overpopulation. And at some point you would run out of water. And that was the moment that Tehran got so close to being completely run out of water, meaning that the day zero was hitting.

That's the day that all the reservoirs would be completely empty. And then there is no water in the tap. That means you cannot even find water under the ground and so on for that, many people. And Tehran got very close to it after a few years of drought. So this was very symbolic because it's a place that a lot of investment has happened. It's a city that the government is trying to protect. And when the problem reaches that stage, you understand how serious it is.

AMY: Wow. I know that there are lots of different causes for that scarcity. And you've spoken and written about that. You know, you left Iran, you had this very international education. In 2017, you returned to serve as the deputy of the Department of Environment, which is a pretty significant post. And I read that you had said you went back with the hope of creating hope. What sort of hope were you trying to create? Hope for what?

KAVEH: There are two things there. One is, as someone interested in environmental protection, you have a tough job. The country is running out of water. Environmental degradation is there. And you want to say, still, there is hope. We can do something because it's about preventing further damages. Right. And that's how I think about it. 

But in, in my personal case, it was also a story of back then there was a nuclear deal, some peace with the West and some hope had been created. And then I got a very, very unprecedented offer from Tehran to go and help and, and, you know, it's very hard to work for that system. You know, our generation, we were born right after the 1979 revolution. Things have been very hard for a lot of us, and a lot of us migrated. But then at the same time, you think, what if they really want a change?

But that didn't work out, unfortunately. You know.

AMY: You are now living in exile, correct?

KAVEH: Yes. I have not been able to return home since the day I resigned.

AMY: But you continued your work on water, and you’re now leading a think tank at the UN, the Institute for Water, Environment and Health. In fact, you just won a major award, the Stockholm Water Prize, in part because of your research on what you call ‘water bankruptcy.’ Can you tell us more about that term, and why you think it’s important that ordinary people understand it to be something different from water stress or water crisis? 

KAVEH: The framing I use there is a product of two decades of thinking and working in research and also, experiencing things in a very painful way in Iran. But let's look at some of the terms we have been using so far. One is stress, water stress. And that means that, like, you're withdrawing a lot of water from your system. You can be very stressed, like, as a human being, like, you know, you can be very stressed, but still functional. You got to be worried, but you can continue to work. 

Then there is a term, very well known and that is water crisis. Crises are just shocks. They are very temporary. And when you're in a crisis, there is still hope that you can fix the problem.

That's what you communicate to the stakeholders. That's what you communicate to all the affected parties. But if something is in a crisis forever, maybe this is your new normal. 

And that's how the term water bankruptcy came into existence. To explain this situation where actually the baseline functions are goal and you can never restore the system to where it was. What you thought is your anomaly becomes your new normal. This is what you need to face. And that's what my hometown is facing. That's where, like my nation is facing. But that's also something that the rest of the world in many places is facing. We cannot communicate to people that we are only in a crisis. Indeed, if we do that, we are sending a wrong signal to people that this is fixable. Spend more money. Let's approve one more project. Let's take out more water. Let's take more loans from nature and fix this problem. 

But that's what we have done. The checking account is now empty. That's our surface water that gets recharged by nature every year. The savings account that we inherited from our grandparents are also gone. Groundwater level is declining in many places. Glaciers are melting as well, so our reserves are very low. We have used not only the interest but also our principal. We have exhausted everything we have hot and now we are left with many creditors that are demanding water. But we cannot give that to them. And we keep saying, no, this is a drought. This is a water stress situation. This is a crisis. No, it is not. It's a failure. 

Just like a bankrupt person, you have a choice to make. You either admit to your bankruptcy, you surrender, and you say, you know, let's work with each other. We have some assets still left. We can prevent further damages and further, you know, failures. But we have to live with what we have, and we have to transform the business model. The business model is not working anymore. Not only do we need to mitigate what can be mitigated, but we also need to adapt to a new reality. Yeah.

AMY: So once we actually wrap our heads around the fact that we are in water bankruptcy, what do we do with that information? What sort of actions should follow from that kind of paradigm shift?

KAVEH: First thing is to write down everything that you know, how much you owe up to people, what assets you have, believe it or not, in the water game we do not have those information readily available in many places. Some stakeholders even benefit from lack of transparency..

So that's a very first step. Second thing that we got to think about is the conditions of countries are different. Since economic development status is different. Their resilience is different. Notions of what's fair is different. So these differences are there. And we’ve got to take into account those differences if you want to write rules or guidelines for handling that sort of bankruptcy.

Manifestations of water bankruptcy are very different from one location to another. You should not always think that this is the issue of the dry areas of the world. We are in Toronto right now, a city nearby. Waterloo. It is now having issues with permits, because they have issued too many permits and they don't have enough water.

And we're in Canada, the country with a lot of fresh water, right. One of the top in the world. Still, if you don't plan well, you would eventually run out of water. And that's the number one lesson to understand. Just like financial bankruptcy, you can be rich or poor and still get bankrupt. What matters is how you manage your budget.

Our recommendation is that we should not come up with a like a set of rules that we want to fit to every society, because things are very different across systems. And if we do that, actually that's how we make mistakes again. I mean, let's remember this story of Iran. Iran has been a dry place for how long? Thousands of years. Yet the Persians, you know, survived, their civilization was there because they had learn to to live with the water condition they had. The problem started when they tried to blindly copy the models of other countries and bring technology into their system. And that's not only the Iranians. The Saudis also made mistakes. The Egyptians made mistakes, the Iraqis, Libyans and so on. And so that's why we have to respect the things that are indigenous, and then they're relevant to every society.

AMY: We’ll have more of my conversation with Kaveh Madani right after this.

MUSIC

[12:50] BREAK

MUSIC

AMY: I know we're talking at a fairly high level about all of these concepts, and I want to just bring it down to the ground as well. What is life like for a person who's living with water bankruptcy on a day to day level? And I know there's different answers, different places.

KAVEH: Wherever we have humans, water bankruptcy signals are there, systems have become already bankrupt or they're near the bankruptcy situation. 70% of the world's water is in the good hands of farmers, most of them in the poor economies of the world. In the developing world, many of them are forming for subsistence. So water to them is their livelihood, is the source of income.

Is their food. Taking water away from them means hunger, displacement, unemployment, suffering and starving children. That means suicide for for people, water, bankruptcy, lack of availability means that that women and children must walk for four miles and kilometers to fetch water, bring a bucket of water back home for cooking and washing and cleaning and all of that.

There is no toilet. There is no tap water. All of this is taken for granted in a place where I grew up. Now still we talk about Tehran becoming bankrupt. That means that you had tap water for the last so many decades. High quality water, highly treated. But then soon you can lose it. So that's the other thing that can happen.

Water bankruptcy is not about quantity, only. It can be about quality as well. There are places where they have a lot of water, plenty of water on paper, rivers flowing. But the water is highly polluted. That means clean water is not there. If you go to the environment, components of nature. For us that means wetlands that dry up and never come back again. You know, we see lakes drying up. We have seen the Aral Sea. We have seen the salt lakes, Great Salt Lake in Utah, we have seen Lake Rumi in northwest Iran. We’ve seen Jordan Valley, Lake Mead, you know, behind Hoover Dam, the biggest reservoir in the United States, being at this lowest level. And then you have conflicts. 

In Colorado River there is a treaty, but the available water is less than that amount. And now there are these fights. That's why we have some of the international treaties now being broken under tension. Pakistan and India are fighting. We have tensions on the Tigris and Euphrates basin. We have the countries of the Nile fighting over water.

AMY: One of the most sobering parts of the report, I found, was the connection that you draw between water issues in conflict as you were just talking about, and that can happen within or between countries. I'm wondering, how is the current conflict in Iran affecting the water issues there or vice versa? How are the water issues that were preexisting there connected to this ongoing conflict?

KAVEH: You know, Iran is a place which unfortunately is experiencing a lot of issues. And we’ve got to be very careful about interpreting what's happening. So, as you said, back in November, even last summer, we were talking about the risk of day zero. Then there was rain and snow, and the risk was gone.

Then there were like air pollution problems, for example. And then, protests and, you know, thousands of people being murdered by this system. Now, those people, when they came out, they didn't chant for water. That was not their first request. Water issues were put down as a priority because the country had other issues to be concerned about.

But that doesn't mean that water has not contributed to the accumulated anger and concerns and stress of people. Right? So that's the first thing to understand, that it's not directly related or correlated. So we cannot say that everything in Iran started because of that. That's false attribution or correlation. But it doesn't mean that water environment does not have a role because people keep thinking about these things and it would affect their lives, it would affect the price of food, it would affect all employment opportunities in the country. So water issues or water degradation or water bankruptcy can increase the frequency and intensity of conflicts around the world. There is no peace without water. That is something we know well. 

But there is another angle to this that we need to also pay attention to. There is no water without peace either. In a country that I grew up in, back in November, we had the luxury of being concerned about the day zero. A few months later, in this country, people were concerned about the attacks of the United States to the infrastructure because the president of the United States was saying that he's going to attack the infrastructure. He's going to like, destroy all power plants and so on. If there is no power plant, if there is no electricity, there is no water, because water can not be pumped and treated and transferred and, you know, transported. So then you kind of look back and feel that that problem was a luxury problem. Right.

And Iran is not an underdeveloped country. You think about what has happened in the rest of the region, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria. But when it comes to water in Gaza and in this war, we saw like threats and even actions of attacking desalination plants. No shame in saying that we are going to attack desalination plants.

These are civilian infrastructure providing water to the civilians and their interruption, their disruption means a health crisis, like a disruption of daily lives, disruption of the economy and so on. So there is no water without peace either. As we are speaking this week, we have seen oil slicks in the Persian Gulf, like all over the media.

We see these because tankers are being attacked. We don't even know when there are leakages from the transport system because who cares about the environment when civilians are being killed, right? How can you expect the war mongers who are proud of killing innocent civilians to care about the Asiatic and Iranian cheetah? Do you think they would care about the turtles in the Persian Gulf? They won't. 

And that's the problem you have. And that's something that we don't see enough of conversation about, that many places in the world where conflicts are, you had the issue of environmental degradation, but maybe the cause of the environmental degradation was the lack of stability. And then you have a reinforcing loop that I think, you know, makes things worse and worse because because, you know, your environment is degrading as your stability is degrading.

And that loop is going to get worse and worse. So that's the reality that we need to face and learn. And then hopefully if we want to change, then the number one thing that we have to advocate for is peace, a fair peace and a lasting peace. So I think, anyone who legitimately cares about the environment, should be very nervous about any war anywhere in the world.

MUSIC

AMY: To learn more about Kaveh’s work at the United Nations, check out the Institute for Water, and Environment and Health. We’ll put a link to their website and Kaveh’s report on Water Bankruptcy in the show notes. 

CREDITS

Threshold Conversations is produced by Sam Moore. Our music is by Todd Sickafoose. I’m executive producer Amy Martin. Thank you for listening, and for considering making a donation to support this show at threshold podcast dot org.