Global groundwater assessments rank Iran among countries with the highest groundwater depletion rate using coarse spatial scales that hinder detection of regional imbalances between renewable groundwater supply and human withdrawals. Herein, we use in situ data from 12,230 piezometers, 14,856 observation wells, and groundwater extraction points to provide ground-based evidence about Iran’s widespread groundwater depletion and salinity problems. While the number of groundwater extraction points increased by 84.9% from 546,000 in 2002 to over a million in 2015, the annual groundwater withdrawal decreased by 18% (from 74.6 to 61.3 km³/y) primarily due to physical limits to fresh groundwater resources (i.e., depletion and/or salinization). On average, withdrawing 5.4 km³/y of nonrenewable water caused groundwater tables to decline 10 to 100 cm/y in different regions, averaging 49 cm/y across the country. This caused elevated annual average electrical conductivity (EC) of groundwater in vast arid/semiarid areas of central and eastern Iran (16 out of 30 subbasins), indicating “very high salinity hazard” for irrigation water. The annual average EC values were generally lower in the wetter northern and western regions, where groundwater EC improvements were detected in rare cases. Our results based on high-resolution groundwater measurements reveal alarming water security threats associated with declining fresh groundwater quantity and quality due to many years of unsustainable use. Our analysis offers insights into the environmental implications and limitations of water-intensive development plans that other water-scarce countries might adopt.

Traditional, mainstream definitions of drought describe it as deficit in water-related variables or water-dependent activities (e.g., precipitation, soil moisture, surface and groundwater storage, and irrigation) due to natural variabilities that are out of the control of local decision-makers. Here, we argue that within coupled human-water systems, drought must be defined and understood as a process as opposed to a product to help better frame and describe the complex and interrelated dynamics of both natural and human-induced changes that define anthropogenic drought as a compound multidimensional and multiscale phenomenon, governed by the combination of natural water variability, climate change, human decisions and activities, and altered micro-climate conditions due to changes in land and water management. This definition considers the full spectrum of dynamic feedbacks and processes (e.g., land-atmosphere interactions and water and energy balance) within human-nature systems that drive the development of anthropogenic drought. This process magnifies the water supply demand gap and can lead to water bankruptcy, which will become more rampant around the globe in the coming decades due to continuously growing water demands under compounding effects of climate change and global environmental degradation. This challenge has de facto implications for both short-term and long-term water resources planning and management, water governance, and policymaking. Herein, after a brief overview of the anthropogenic drought concept and its examples, we discuss existing research gaps and opportunities for better understanding, modeling, and management of this phenomenon.

As soft political tools, economic sanctions aim at isolating a sanctioned state and hurt its economy to force it to change course, policies, and actions. In response to sanctions and to evade their grip, a sanctioned state adopts a range of survivalist, aggressive, and unsustainable policies that reduce the economic pressure of sanctions at the expense of accelerated environmental degradation. While economic sanctions cannot be blamed as the cause of environmental problems in sanctioned states, their role in catalyzing environmental degradation is noteworthy. This paper takes the first step in setting the theoretical ground for exploring the environmental implications of sanctions by developing a generic causal model that explains how economic sanctions can impact the environment. It is shown that sanctions lower the priority of the environmental sector in the public policy agenda in a sanctioned state and increase the natural resource-intensity of its economy. It is argued that although the environmental damages of sanctions are mainly unintended by the sanctioning and sanctioned states, such damages are unavoidable in practice. The study calls for attention to the transgenerational and transboundary environmental impacts of economic sanctions and their justice and human rights implications for which the sanctioning and sanctioned states must be held accountable.

The anthropogenic impacts of development and frequent droughts have limited Iran's water availability. This has major implications for Iran's agricultural sector which is responsible for about 90% of water consumption at the national scale. This study investigates if declining water availability impacted agriculture in Iran. Using the Mann‐Kendall and Sen's slope estimator methods, we explored the changes in Iran's agricultural production and area during the 1981–2013 period. Despite decreasing water availability during this period, irrigated agricultural production and area continuously increased. This unsustainable agricultural development, which would have been impossible without the overabstraction of surface and ground water resources, has major long‐term water, food, environmental, and human security implications for Iran.

The coastal areas of Florida, United States, are exposed to increasing risk of flooding due to sea level rise as well as severe hurricanes. Florida regulations suggest constructing stormwater retention ponds as an option to retain excess runoff generated by the increased impervious area and to protect the environment by reducing pollutants from new developments. Groundwater level rise can significantly lower the soil storage capacity and infiltration at retention ponds, in turn, reducing the pond's capacity to capture consecutive storms due to longer pond volume recovery time. Partial groundwater inundation can affect retention ponds' ability to decrease peak flow rates and keep the post-development outflow lower than or equal to pre-development conditions. In this paper, the reliability and performance of a retention pond near Tampa Bay, Florida, was evaluated under sea level rise conditions. An integrated surface water and groundwater model was developed, and the groundwater table was projected for future conditions as a function of sea level rise. The results showed that sea level rise could increase the seasonal high water elevation of the retention pond up to 40 cm by mid-21st century. This increase lowered the reliability of the retention pond by about 45%. The pond failed to recover the designed treatment volume within required 72 h because of the high groundwater table, increasing the risk of pollutant discharge. Furthermore, the peak flow and volume of runoff significantly increased under sea level rise and associated groundwater table rise conditions. The study results suggest that it is imperative to consider future sea level rise conditions in stormwater design in low-lying coastal areas of Florida and around the world to prevent poor pond performance and increased risk of flooding in the future.

The socio-hydrology community has been very successful in promoting the need for taking the human factor into account in the mainstream hydrology literature since 2012. However, the interest in studying and modeling human-water systems is not new and pre-existed the post-2012 socio-hydrology. So, it is critical to ask what socio-hydrology has been able to offer that would have been unachievable using the existing methods, tools, and analysis frameworks. Thus far, the socio-hydrology studies show a strong overlap with what has already been in the literature, especially in the water resources systems and coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) areas. Nevertheless, the work in these areas has been generally dismissed by the socio-hydrology literature. This paper overviews some of the general concerns about originality, practicality, and contributions of socio-hydrology. It is argued that while in theory, a common sense about the need for considering humans as an integral component of water resources systems models can strengthen our coupled human-water systems research, the current approaches and trends in socio-hydrology can make this interest area less inclusive and interdisciplinary.

Anthropogenic influences can modulate the low-frequency variability of extreme precipitation and increase the likelihood of flooding events. It is not, however, clear how much and in what manner the low-frequency variability has changed in recent decades as global warming has intensified. Here, we investigate the contribution of anthropogenic influences to the time evolution of extreme precipitation anomalies in different seasons using Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) and CMIP5 model simulations and observations over Europe. Our results show a latitudinal dependence of changes in extreme precipitation anomalies for all seasons due to anthropogenic impacts. While the contribution of anthropogenic influences to extreme precipitation anomalies at low latitudes (<50 degrees) is less than 8% in all seasons, it goes up to 26% and 41% at mid (50 degrees-60 degrees) and high (>60 degrees) latitudes. Without the offsetting effect of anthropogenic aerosols, anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases alone should have produced larger anomalies than observed. For all seasons, the more extreme the precipitation, the larger the anthropogenic influences.

Lake Urmia-a shallow endemic hypersaline lake in northwest Iran-has undergone a dramatic decline in its water level (WL), by about 8 m, since 1995. The primary cause of the WL decline in Lake Urmia has been debated in the scientific literature, regarding whether it has been predominantly driven by atmospheric climate change or by human activities in the watershed landscape. Using available climate, hydrological, and vegetation data for the period 1981-2015, this study analyzes and aims to explain the lake desiccation based on other observed hydro-climatic and vegetation changes in the Lake Urmia watershed and classical exploratory statistical methods. The analysis accounts for the relationships between atmospheric climate change (precipitation P, temperature T), and hydrological (soil moisture SM, and WL) and vegetation cover (VC; including agricultural crops and other vegetation) changes in the landscape. Results show that P, T, and SM changes cannot explain the sharp decline in lake WL since 2000. Instead, the agricultural increase of VC in the watershed correlates well with the lake WL change, indicating this human-driven VC and associated irrigation expansion as the dominant human driver of the Lake Urmia desiccation. Specifically, the greater transpiration from the expanded and increasingly irrigated agricultural crops implies increased total evapotranspiration and associated consumptive use of water (inherently related to the irrigation and water diversion and storage developments in the watershed). Thereby the runoff from the watershed into the lake has decreased, and the remaining smaller inflow to the lake has been insufficient for keeping up the previous lake WL, causing the observed WL drop to current conditions.

By combining long-term ground-based data on water withdrawal with climate model projections, this study quantifies the compounding effects of human activities and climate change on surface water availability in Iran over the twenty-first century. Our findings show that increasing water withdrawal in Iran, due to population growth and increased agricultural activities, has been the main source of historical water stress. Increased levels of water stress across Iran are expected to continue or even worsen over the next decades due to projected variability and change in precipitation combined with heightened water withdrawals due to increasing population and socio-economic activities. The greatest rate of decreased water storage is expected in the Urmia Basin, northwest of Iran, (varying from -8.3mm/year in 2010-2039 to -61.6mm/year in 2070-2099 compared with an observed rate of 4mm/year in 1976-2005). Human activities, however, strongly dominate the effects of precipitation variability and change. Major shifts toward sustainable land and water management are needed to reduce the impacts of water scarcity in the future, particularly in Iran's heavily stressed basins like Urmia Basin, which feeds the shrinking Lake Urmia.

Being the second-largest country in the Middle East, Iran has a long history of civilisation during which several dynasties have been overthrown and established and health-related structures have been reorganised. Iran has had the replacement of traditional practices with modern medical treatments, emergence of multiple pioneer scientists and physicians with great contributions to the advancement of science, environmental and ecological changes in addition to large-scale natural disasters, epidemics of multiple communicable diseases, and the shift towards non-communicable diseases in recent decades. Given the lessons learnt from political instabilities in the past centuries and the approaches undertaken to overcome health challenges at the time, Iran has emerged as it is today. Iran is now a country with a population exceeding 80 million, mainly inhabiting urban regions, and has an increasing burden of non-communicable diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, diabetes, malignancies, mental disorders, substance abuse, and road injuries.