Iranian Women Navigate The Water Crisis
The dust tastes of salt. It’s a fine, pale powder that settles on everything in the villages surrounding what’s left of Lake Urmia, once the Middle East’s largest saltwater lake and now a ghostly expanse of cracked, saline earth. For the women here, this is the taste of daily life. It’s the taste of a crisis managed not in government boardrooms, but in kitchens, courtyards, and fields.
This isn’t just about thirst. It’s a complete reordering of domestic life, a silent, relentless burden placed predominantly on women. In cities like Isfahan, where the Zayandeh River bed is now a sandy highway for pedestrians, the taps run for just a few hours a day. Sometimes not at all. So the calculus of every day begins with water. Fatemeh, a mother of two in a suburb of the city, explains that her mind is a constant ledger of liquid assets, tracking every drop used for washing vegetables, for laundry, for the ritual ablutions of prayer.
“You hear the pump start, and your heart races a little,” Fatemeh says, her voice low. “It’s a sound of relief, but also anxiety. How long will it last this time? Is it enough?”
Her family, like millions of others, has integrated a secondary water system into their home. Blue plastic barrels and rooftop tanks, filled during the brief windows of municipal supply, are the new normal. The mental load is immense. It’s women who must plan the cooking, the cleaning, the bathing around this unpredictable schedule. They are the ones who must recycle the “greywater” from washing rice to nurture a few precious potted herbs, a small act of defiance against the encroaching desert.
The problem gets worse outside the cities. Much worse. In the agricultural heartlands, the crisis is existential. Zohreh’s family has farmed pistachios for three generations. But the deep wells her grandfather dug have run dry, and the government’s restrictions on new drilling, an attempt to manage collapsing aquifers, have left them stranded. Her husband now drives a taxi in a nearby city, leaving Zohreh to manage the homestead and what little remains of their farm.
She describes the situation not with anger, but with a profound sense of loss. The work is now a careful choreography of conservation. She speaks of how the changing climate has forced a shift from water-intensive crops to more resilient, but less profitable, ones like saffron. This adaptation, however, comes at a cost. The men leave for the cities to find work, a mass migration that hollows out rural communities and leaves women to tend to the elderly, the children, and the barren land. They become the de facto keepers of a dying way of life, their resilience a quiet counterpoint to decades of what many scientists, according to reports from Sharif University of Technology, call catastrophic water mismanagement.
And then there’s the health. The water that does come from the tap is often brackish and heavy with minerals, a result of over-extraction from groundwater sources. Women report a rise in kidney stones and skin ailments, health issues they must manage with limited resources. Caring for sick children or elderly parents, a role that traditionally falls to them, becomes an even heavier burden when the very water needed for care is suspect. The water crisis, it turns out, is also a public health crisis in slow motion.
But these women are not passive victims. They are innovators. In the parched south, some are reviving traditional water conservation methods, building small underground cisterns, or ab anbars, to capture infrequent rainfall. Community networks have become vital. Women share information via messaging apps about which neighborhoods have water, they trade tips on fixing leaky pipes, and they organize to lobby local officials for more reliable service. These are small-scale, decentralized solutions born of necessity, operating in the vacuum left by large-scale, and largely failed, infrastructure projects.
This is the new reality. It’s a life dictated by the gurgle of a pump, the level of a tank, and the salty film on the kitchen window. For a whole generation of Iranian women, managing scarcity has become an ingrained skill, passed from mother to daughter. Zohreh now shows her own teenage daughter how to read the clouds, not for the promise of a storm, but for the faint hope of a shower strong enough to yield a few precious liters for their rooftop garden.
