Iran specifically had infrastructure in place to help manage the water for Tehran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat). The Ayatollahs not only _destroyed_ that infrastructure and the system of humans needed to maintain it, but they also encouraged pumping of water from local aquifers, among other obviously stupid water management techniques: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/khomeini...
So, you are right, but in Iran's case, the current regime pretty much did the opposite of anything you should have done, while also chopping of their hands to do anything more.
This equals about 1.7 Million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per day, which is an increase of 120% since year 2000 and corresponds to about 2% of the global CO2 emissions.
No nation on earth like Iran, save perhaps for China and Norway, is in such a unique position of power, both economically, socially, and with the engineering knowhow) and political ability to actually do something to prevent climate damage. Instead they are making the situation more difficult.
> I forgot that it’s much better to let your people starve
It's actually the US making the Iranian people starve on account of their (US's) economic war against Iran, and the same goes for Cuba and the Cubans living in Cuba. Saying that the Iranians should embrace with full arms the same Westerners that are making them starve right at this moment has to be a bit.
Climate change is actually a strong reason for better management. The same is true everywhere. More floods? You need to provide better drainage. Drier climate risking more forest fires? You need to manage forests better.
In many cases governments are cutting back on spending on dealing with these sorts of problems because they can avoid blame by saying it is a result of climate change and few people ask why they did not act to mitigate the effects.
What gets me is that the same politicians in the US sat things med to be managed better but also that we always need to be spending less. It’s basically “not my problem, someone else can take care of that.”
I agree with those causes. But climate change is also a cause. It magnifies the consequences of mismanagement, reducing the luxury incompetence margin that an equally incompetent theocrat/autocrat could have relied on 30 years ago.
As climate change gets worse in the future, the margin for error will keep shrinking. More countries will start to experience similar problems. Only the most competent will survive, but eventually regional instability will attack the foundations of that state capacity as a contagion byproduct, making it harder to be the competent outlier.
This all becomes a push driver for migration towards the colder north, as the equator becomes progressively destabilized and uninhabitable. Not only water shortages in dry climates but wet-bulb temperatures in temperate climates that make existing outdoors dangerous for periods of the year.
Yes I agree that climate change is a huge problem but it doesn’t release the leaders of a country of their responsibility to mitigate the effects wherever possible.
This argument is particularly pernicious as it can, in it's general form, always deflect from the issues of climate change and always focus on blaming local governments.
This is what will happen in the future btw - climate change will apply pressure via famine and droughts, but the fallout will always be attributed to the failure of local governments to correctly "manage the change".
We'll go from "climate change is a hoax" to "climate change is just a given and it's your duty to manage it".
I recall reading about a paper in SciAm or American Scientist a couple of decades ago, where they had trained a ML model to predict regional conflicts or civil wars. The main input was scarcity of food, mainly through price IIRC.
They trained it on historical data up to the 90s or so, and had it predict the "future" up to the time of the article. And as I recall it did very well. They even included some actual near-future predictions as well which also turned out pretty accurately as I recall.
Which I suppose isn't a huge surprise after all. People don't like to starve.
My memory isn't good enough to recall the name of the paper, however doing some searching I see the field has not stood still. Here[1] is an example of a more recent paper where they've included more variables. A quote from the conclusions:
The closest natural resource–society interaction to predict conflict risk according to our models was food production within its economic and demographic context, e.g., with GDP per capita, unemployment, infant mortality and youth bulge.
while the drought was the last straw, i think the mismanagement of their water resources by the regime (for embezzlement of public funds, direct or indirect, into insider pockets etc) is the true root cause. There's "enough" water to last thru the current drought, if it was better utilized in the past.
“The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a former deputy head of the country’s environment department and now director of the United Nations University’s Institute of Water, Environment and Health.
It takes a certain kind of self-delusion to blame climate change and at the same time ignore that your own actions has been one of the major drivers, both in the past and today, of that very same climate change.
While you cannot put the blame on climate change onto iran alone (all of humanity has a part in it), the regime wants to deflect the blame conveniently onto climate change so as to absolve themselves of being responsible for their current water crisis.
So it's not really delusion, but irresponsibility and selfishness.
I’m only putting 2-3% of the global climate change as directly attributable to Iran. And their explicit attempts at preventing progress in stopping it.