11/19/2025
If there's one under-examined news story in the world I'm watching super closely (besides Bird flu), it is the response to Iran's drought.
More than half the nation is facing extreme drought, with most water levels below 3%. Fifty days after the start of the rainy season there, there hasn't been a drop in most of the major cities. More than 150,000 people have already been displaced, many of them farmers, and there is talk of EVACUATING THE CITY OF TEHRAN.
Meanwhile, Iraq has less than 1/4 of the groundwater it had and is rapidly drying, so much that agriculture is dying out in some regions. You remember you learned about the cradle of civilization and the first cities in school? About the ways the Tigris and Euphrates shaped our world, with the water of those marshy regions creating the agriculture that created cities?
Well, right now an increasing number of nations are damming what's left of those rivers, hoping to hold out for enough water for THEIR people - which means that Southern Iraq no longer has marshy wetland regions that it can tap for agriculture and human sustenence or natural sustenence. In Sistan and Beluchitstan, the rivers and lakes have dried up almost entirely.
Extreme heat in the Middle East is now making Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, oil rich nations that can afford it, pay more of its GDP for desalinization than any others. Poorer nations cannot afford desalinization, and there are consequences to desalinization - the salt from the plants is dumped back in the ocean, creating a brackish, high saline environment that almost nothing can live in, and destroying fishing stocks in the Gulf. Saudi Arabia uses 300,000 barrels of oil per day to create fresh water, and temperatures rarely even at night fall below 34C in summer.
For years, people grew wheat and rice in the Gulf, irrigating heavily to make those crops. Olives, date palms, pomegranates and other traditional tree crops cannot be irrigated and are dying. Now there's not enough water in many places even to irrigate traditional crops that do better in teh heat and drought. Iran was the first country to repeatedly hit 50C temps, and the extreme heat and drought mean that agriculture is now largely impossible in many parts of the nation, and there is talk of evacuating the entire city of Tehran since water is inconsistent at best in the poorer parts of the city and resevoirs are headed to zero.
Meanwhile, Egypt is also headed to absolute scarcity - it is expected that by the end of this year, there will only be 500 cubic meters of water per person for the entire country for everyone even with the Nile. It is hard to imagine, since the Nile has literally been the blood that flows through Egypt.
Egypt and many of the coastal Gulf states also have a huge salinization problem, as rising sea levels contaminate soils and fresh water with salt. 40% of Egyptian cropland is affected by salt contamination and much will have to be removed from agriculture soon. Rice cultivation is now banned in Egypt, and Wheat turns yellow and dies due to salt sensitivity.
In Turkey, the same is happening to sunflower crops, and in Thrace, the largest sunflower oil region, yields are down by more than half. Turkish rainfall is down by 39%, and dams are so low that in some of the tourist regions, the water has to be shut off during the daytime.
Every single assessment of climate change indicates that the Middle East and North Africa will be one of the worst affected regions in any climate scenarios, and they are in particularly dire danger if in fact AMOC decline or shutdown continues to progress, which well, it is.
The 4.2 Kiloyear event, which was more than 100 years of extreme drought in the region that brought down multiple empires seems to have been linked to AMOC decline. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a character laments "we have reduced the forest to wasteland." The Curse of Akkad, written 500 years later, talks of a megadrought in which the "great agricultural tracts produced no grain."
At only 1.5C over historic norms, many states in the region are reaching wet bulb temperatures and seeing untenable drought. The two potential futures are expanded and accellerating climate change that bring us to 3C+ quite rapidly, or worse, an AMOC shutdown which will increase the heating of the region as well as shifting rainfall away.
Right now we are largely tracking the IPCC's worst case scenarios, and there's no major plan we can see that would keep us below 3C by 2050 - and that's only 25 years. By the time today's children are adults, the odds are extremely good that most of the region will be inhabitable only by the wealthy and a much smaller percentage of poor people who serve them, since only the wealthy can afford major climate mitigations and imported food in extreme climate disasters.
The blunt truth is that the land that everyone is currently fighting over for extractive purposes is likely to be largely uninhabitable within decades, and that isn't a "today is fine and tomorrow everyone leaves process" - it is a process of droughts, floods, extreme heat events, crop failures, hunger, extraction, disaster capitalism, water wars and violence, and we are all completely unprepared for what's coming.
We know that some tiny countries facing extreme sea level rise are making plans for evacuation, but Iran has a population of 86 million and the region has nearly 500 million. Everyone will not leave, nor will every nation be affected in the same ways, but I would expect that by 2060, the population to be halved in the case of AMOC shutdown, and dropped by a quarter without it, and the politics of water, food and life in that region to get stunningly worse in a place that is already deeply fraught.
Which brings us back to Tehran. If 15 million Iranians have to evacuate, where do they go, with more than half the country in extreme drought? What incentives does that give their government to either create or resist conflict? How does that change the entire picture of the region and the world order? I don't think anyone really knows for sure.
