The Great Drying: How Heat Stole the Water from West Asia

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The warning lights are flashing red in Tehran.

Imagine a city of nearly 10 million people facing the prospect of total evacuation. This is not the plot of a dystopian novel; it is the potential reality facing the capital of Iran. Local authorities have warned that if the crisis persists without rain by December 2025, the city may need to be emptied.

This existential threat is the culmination of a punishing five-year drought that has gripped West Asia. While water scarcity is not new to this arid region, the severity of this specific event is unnatural.

Human-induced climate change made the rainfall and temperature conditions that led to the ongoing drought in Syria, Iraq and Iran more frequent and severe, according to new analysis by World Weather Attribution. 

This new analysis, which uses weather observations and not climate models, is an update of a previous study in the region published in 2023. While the previous analysis had already found that climate change had worsened what was then a three-year drought, the updated results show an even stronger climate change signal.

The Invisible Thief: It’s Not Just the Rain

For years, we have looked at the sky for answers to drought, but the culprit was rising from the ground. The West Asia region, encompassing the Fertile Crescent, has suffered from exceptionally low rains since the winter of 2020. However, a lack of rain is only half the story.

The study reveals a critical mechanism: Evapotranspiration.

As the world warms due to the burning of fossil fuels, the air becomes thirstier.

The Heat Factor: Mean temperatures in the region have increased substantially.

The Drying Soil: Higher temperatures increase evaporation, pulling moisture out of the soil at an accelerated rate.

This creates a vicious cycle. Even if rainfall levels were somewhat low, in a pre-industrial world, they would have been manageable. But today, the heat turns a "dry spell" into a catastrophe. The study found that without fossil fuel warming, the very conditions driving today’s "exceptional" drought would have resulted in normal, non-drought conditions.

Loaded Dice: The Staggering Statistics

The statistics emerging from this study are startling. They illustrate how climate change has loaded the climatic dice against human survival in the region.

The researchers used the Standardised Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) to measure drought severity.

Then (Pre-industrial): In a world 1.3°C cooler, a five-year drought of this magnitude would be a once-in-a-lifetime anomaly, expected to occur only once every 250 years.

Now (1.3°C Warmer): Today, this same five-year catastrophe is expected to return every 5 years.

Climate change has made this specific five-year drought approximately 50 times more likely.

Furthermore, the intensity has shifted dramatically. Conditions that we now classify as "Extreme" (D3) or "Exceptional" (D4) drought would not have been classified as a drought at all in a world without human-induced warming.

A Region on the Brink

The consequences of this "supercharged" drought are visible across the landscape of West Asia, devastating lives and dismantling history.

Iran: This is the worst drought on record for the country. Agriculture, which consumes over 90% of Iran's water, has been crippled, devastating farmers who rely on irrigation.

Iraq: The year 2025 became the driest on record since 1933. Water levels in the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers plummeted by up to 27%.

Syria: Rainfall crashed by nearly 70%, causing a wheat shortfall of 2.73 million tonnes and leaving millions food insecure.

This environmental stress is compounded by human factors. Unsustainable water management, over-grazing, and agricultural expansion have degraded the land, leaving it defenseless against the heat. As Mariam Zachariah of Imperial College London notes, "Climate change has been stacking drought on top of drought," leaving no time for the land or the people to recover.

The Verdict: A Warning for the World

The crisis in West Asia is a window into the future of a warming planet. Friederike Otto, a professor in Climate Science, warns that these conditions are no longer rare; they are the new common reality of a world warmed by fossil fuels.

If the world fails to phase out fossil fuels, these "exceptional" droughts will become even more frequent. Projections indicate that nearly one-third of major cities worldwide could exhaust their water supplies by mid-century.

The drought in Iran, Iraq, and Syria is not just a weather event; it is a signal. As Roop Singh of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre states, a warming world turns "otherwise manageable challenges into much larger crises".

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