Iran Regime’s Ministry of Energy Refuses to Grant the Right to Dying Lake Urmia

By Staff Writer

The director of planning and integration of Lake Urmia Restoration Project, Masoud Tajrishi, stated that Iran’s management of water resources is based on fear and ignorance; he reported that the Energy Ministry refuses to obey the law and release the dam waters into Lake Urmia.

According to the government-controlled news outlet ISNA (8th June 2018), Tajrishi states that after ‘water consumption’, ‘environmental protection of Lake Urmia’ takes the top priority; however, the Energy Ministry does not even consider it a priority to begin with.

He said: “Each year, the requirements of the dams are specified according to the annual reviews; this year, we notified the Energy Ministry to release water from the dams into Lake Urmia, in March and April; but the ministry did not do as we asked, and just kept the water behind the dams”.

Tajrishi added, the Ministry’s excuse was to “preserve water for summer”; which as he puts, proves that the Ministry does not conduct any proper scientific studies of the existing water resources.

The news website of the Energy Ministry, “POWN”, had published a report earlier, in which the Ministry had announced a 43% reduction in its water supplies, and a 61% decline in its hydroelectric power”.

Tajrishi stated that following his correspondence with the Energy Ministry, they released water into Lake Urmia for only two days, before they cut it off again.

Water Politics Limited, which is a consulting firm based in the United States, delivers independent analysis on the global strategic water issues; not long ago, it shed some light on Iran’s water crisis too; it reported of Iran’s “water and economic insecurity” as its “biggest and most serious challenges”; it also emphasised that one of the reasons behind such massive water shortage is the fact that more than 600 of Iran’s reservoirs were built “to benefit the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps”.