Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian recently warned that Tehran might soon face evacuation—or even relocation—because of water shortages. His remarks sparked panic, but this is hardly the first time officials have floated moving the capital.
The idea has perennially resurfaced, usually after earthquake scares—after the 1990 Manjil-Rudbar quake and later after Bam in 2003, when the scale of deaths and destruction pushed senior officials to talk about shifting the capital out of quake-prone Tehran. Now the water crisis has made the threat feel immediate. And it’s not just water and fault lines: Tehran’s toxic smog, now a near-constant emergency that repeatedly shuts the city down, may drive its own slow-motion exodus. But whatever the trigger, evacuating Tehran or moving the capital to another region—such as Makran on the Gulf of Oman—is a fantasy, not a solution.
Instead of chasing grand relocations, officials should confront the real problem: decades of bad governance and reckless water management that created this crisis in the first place.
Water scarcity and a collapsing supply network have pushed Tehran to the edge. Land subsidence has weakened the city’s structures, leaving it brittle. A major earthquake would be catastrophic—shattering infrastructure, causing mass casualties, and potentially paralyzing the state’s administrative core at the moment when Iran would face multiple crises.
Gary Sick, a veteran Iran analyst who served on the U.S. National Security Council under several presidents, once warned that a major earthquake and drought striking Tehran together would be beyond a coup for the Islamic Republic, unleashing instability and chaos.
The ruling theocracy in Iran is a major part of the problem. For decades, water policy has been hijacked by the Revolutionary Guards and a “water mafia” of connected contractors, who profit from dam construction binges and interbasin groundwater transfers while sidelining science and blowing past ecological limits.
Tehran’s mayors have prioritized development over logic—an approach epitomized by former Mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi (1990-98), who greatly expanded a capital that simply doesn’t have the water, aquifers, breathable air, stable ground, or seismic safety for endless growth.
Fixing this mess would mean breaking those networks and enforcing real transparency and legal caps—steps the regime is structurally unable to take, given its entrenched financial interests and distorted, security-driven decision-making.
The idea of moving the capital surfaced occasionally even before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but it never rose above scattered talk into a real policy debate. After the revolution, it has flared up whenever Iran is rattled by an earthquake—or even after rumors of one. In the 1980s, Armenian Iranian structural geologist Manuel Berberian was one of the first to demonstrate that the seismic threat to Tehran was quite real.
The findings of Berberian’s pioneering work for the Geological Survey of Iran on Tehran’s fault system and its historical seismicity were stark: Large parts of the city should never have been developed, and millions of Tehran’s residents were at risk. Berberian’s research garnered initial praise, but government officials ignored its warnings as Tehran kept sprawling across multiple active fault lines.
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani became president in 1989 and ushered in a period of “reconstruction” after the devastating Iran-Iraq War (1980-88). Under Rafsanjani, ostensibly more technocratic bureaucrats came to the fore. Among them was Karbaschi, a young cleric in lay clothing who styled himself as a “modern” manager.
In a 2001 interview with the author Nik Kowsar, Karbaschi said he had rejected the idea of abandoning the capital since it reminded him of Brazil moving its capital from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília, which he called an expensive mistake. But rather than tackling badly needs reforms, Karbaschi doubled down on the problems, attempting to revitalize Tehran through large-scale construction projects. Berberian and other experts briefed Rafsanjani on the risks, but Tehran’s expansion continued under Rafsanjani and Karbaschi.
Berberian eventually left Iran for the United States in 1990 after concluding that the Islamic Republic and Iranian academic institutions did not want a non-Muslim expert advising them or teaching Muslim students. His warnings went largely unheeded.
In the 1980s, Iran adopted a set of building regulations—including the national Standard code on quake resistance—meant to make Tehran and other cities more earthquake-resilient. But corruption through selling density, which let developers buy extra floor area ratio/height under Karbaschi and the mayors who followed, effectively circumvented these rules: Older buildings were left unreinforced, and thousands of new ones went up with little real capacity to withstand a major quake.
Instead of fixing Tehran’s underlying risks, Karbaschi adopted the regime’s default strategy of endless construction. The scale of the city ballooned from 182 square miles in 1991 to 239 in 2000, mostly under Karbaschi’s watch. Towers went up on unstable alluvial plains and over the seismic fault setback zones, areas where buildings should be kept away from active faults; water use surged; and officials continued to build dams, drill deep wells, and transfer rivers, all the while claiming that Tehran’s water supply would never run out.
Karbaschi later fell from grace and was briefly jailed, but the vertical, build-first model he normalized outlived him. As aquifers were tapped year after year, the ground beneath Tehran compacted. Subsidence spread, pipes cracked, leaks multiplied, and buildings began to strain, sometimes in plain sight.
According to Iranian experts interviewed by the authors, Tehran would be at far lower risk if the proper codes had been enforced and existing structures properly retrofitted. Instead, permit revenues fueled high-rises on unstable soil and inside fault setback zones. Today, more than 12,000 building parcels in Tehran sit on fault zones, including about 1,000 high-rises over 12 stories.
No wonder the idea of moving the capital keeps coming up. But it’s also a cash cow for a familiar circle of contractors—including the Revolutionary Guard’s Khatam al-Anbiya construction headquarters, a major player in the water mafia.
Last year, then-Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi pegged the relocation price tag at about $100 billion. That breaks down into a shopping list of smaller, billable “necessities”: feasibility studies, site selection, master plans, seismic and water surveys, new highways, rail links, power and water corridors, housing phases, and endless consultancies. Even without an actual plan to move, each sub-project has become a fresh pretext for mega-contracts that flow to Khatam and its affiliates, draining the state budget and routing money through the Guard’s patronage and proxy networks. And because every “phase” can be stretched out for years—even decades—the gravy train doesn’t need an end point to keep rolling.
Relocating more than 14 million people from Tehran and its surrounding suburbs is a practical nonstarter. The current water shortage already strains the country, and no other region has the capacity in housing, jobs, services, or water to absorb that many newcomers. One source said that in internal talk among lower-level managers, even a best-case evacuation might shelter only about 1 million people temporarily, and even they would be stuck worrying that their homes and belongings would be looted while they were gone.
But the solution is not to evacuate Tehran or find another capital. There are no other realistic options. For example, Makran, recently cited by the regime as a potential area for a new capital, is a brutal, hot, dry, and underdeveloped region. In addition, seismologists warn that the Makran coast lies on a subduction zone capable of producing a magnitude 8-plus earthquake and a devastating tsunami.
Saving Tehran from the current water shortage starts with cutting demand, which can be accomplished by reducing consumption, expanding graywater reuse, and fixing leaky pipes. Beyond that, the city needs a serious aquifer recharge. To limit earthquake losses, Iranian leaders must stop construction on or near active faults and on soft, quake-amplifying soils; strengthen older and unsafe buildings as well as key systems such as hospitals, bridges, and water lines; and build a real emergency plan—regular drills, clear evacuation routes, and backup water and power—so the city can function after a major shock.
All of this is doable on paper; the problem is that the current power structure makes doing it in reality nearly impossible.
For one, the regime is under financial duress from largely self-inflicted sanctions. Without a real shift in foreign policy and a clear retreat from its nuclear ambitions, Tehran will get neither Western financing nor serious private investment.
This regime also has a long record of corruption. Its decisions are driven by short-term interests and imposed from the top down, with the public’s welfare treated as an afterthought. Technical fixes won’t work without political change. The system that caused the crisis can’t be trusted to solve it.