The head of Iran’s Soil and Water Research Institute warned that Iran’s soil has reached a “warning point,” and tens of thousands of hectares of the country’s land are eroding each year. He said that despite public awareness of the crisis, no serious action has been taken, and the country needs urgent investment to prevent the recurrence of environmental disasters.
Hadi Asadi-Rahmani, the head of Iran’s Soil and Water Research Institute, said that the soil degradation crisis in Iran has reached a point where “lamentation” is no longer enough.
According to him, everyone knows that soil protection is vital, but “despite this awareness, no practical action has been taken and the destruction continues.”
He noted that only 24 million hectares of Iran’s land area are arable, explaining that the share of arable land per person is about two thousand square meters, but “the soil becomes poorer every year.”
Iraj Soleimanzadeh, the representative of West Azerbaijan Province in the Supreme Council of Provinces, warned on October 14 about the consequences of excessive extraction of groundwater and repeated droughts. He said that land subsidence in the plains of the province, especially the Salmas Plain, has reached 17 centimeters.
Soleimanzadeh described the main cause of the crisis as “management mistakes” and the construction of 32 dams in the eastern river basin of Lake Urmia, which has disrupted the natural flow of water toward West Azerbaijan.
Asadi-Rahmani said that a large portion of Iran’s agricultural production takes place on third- and fourth-grade lands, and now “75% of the country’s soils have less than one percent organic carbon,” a condition that indicates severe soil degradation.
According to him, Iran is following the same path in soil protection as it did with its water resources.
He warned that about 30 thousand hectares of the country’s land are affected by erosion and degradation annually, and this trend will continue in the absence of corrective policies.
Ali Beitollahi, head of the Engineering Seismology and Risk Department at the Road, Housing and Urban Development Research Center (a government-run institution), warned on August 22 that due to the drastic decline of groundwater resources, Iran is now among the top three countries in the world in terms of the number of land subsidence zones.
He stated that the main cause of subsidence in Iran is the lowering of groundwater levels, adding: “Around Tehran, there were places where the water table was twenty to thirty meters deep; now we dig down even one hundred twenty meters, but there is no water anymore. The water has been extracted and not replaced. This is what they call a negative water balance.”
The soil’s need for retirement
Asadi-Rahmani, referring to the United States’ experience in the 1930s, said: “The excessive expansion of mechanized agriculture in that country led to dust storms and the destruction of millions of hectares of land; a crisis that was later contained by the passage of the Soil Conservation Act and the planting of millions of trees.”
He said that the United States today has more than 42 million hectares under conservation agriculture, whereas in Iran the figure is only about 600 thousand hectares.
Asadi-Rahmani also referred to the U.S. “soil retirement” program, in which millions of hectares of farmland were removed from production, leading to the restoration of aquifers and the revitalization of agriculture.
Safdar Niazi-Shahraki, the deputy for water and soil at the Ministry of Agriculture Jihad, said in September 2024: “Soil erosion in Iran is roughly two to 2.5 times that of Asia and five to six times the global average.”
According to him, the average soil erosion in the country is estimated at “about 16.5 tons per hectare.”
