“Mount Damavand Snowless: Iran’s Water Crisis Reaches a Tipping Point”

According to Rokna’s social affairs correspondent, on the road leading to Amol, precisely where Damavand, with its white cap, has always symbolized an early winter, today nothing is visible except a massive, dry rock formation—a mountain that in Azar 1404 does not have even a thin layer of snow on its shoulders. Its grandeur now seems not a symbol of nature’s resilience but a living record of the environmental degradation of this land.

Mount Damavand has always been the natural “water bank” of the Alborz region, where its snow layers gradually melted until Khordad and Tir, feeding the rivers, qanats, and underground aquifers. Yet today, the mountain, which should be covered in snow, appears from afar like a barren slope. Without snow layers, there will be no water in summer. Damavand’s snowlessness means that next year we will hear the wheezing of orchards more than ever; it means the Haraz and Lar rivers will be weaker than ever; it means underground aquifers will sink deeper, and land subsidence will consume the plains more boldly than before.

This image is not merely a climatic phenomenon; it is the direct result of decades of worn-out, flawed, and unplanned water management that has severed Iran from strategic water reserves, useful rainfall, and a sustainable hydrological cycle. Millions of unauthorized wells, hundreds of unjustified dams, river diversions, destruction of pastures and forests, over-extraction from aquifers, and the inability to control consumption together have rendered Damavand incapable of fulfilling its role as a natural water reservoir.

Damavand’s snowlessness in Azar is not just a photograph; it is a bitter confession from nature, stating that Iran is now facing not only water scarcity but the collapse of water order. A management system that still calls this crisis a “lack of rainfall” deliberately avoids telling the truth: this is a structural water crisis, not a seasonal anomaly.

While vehicles traverse the road at the foot of Damavand and urban life continues seemingly indifferent, the mountain without its white cap is shouting louder than any podium: this land is losing its “water of the future.”

This photo may be one of the most important records of 1404; a record that shows that Iran’s water crisis is not a matter of the future but is happening right now—and no one can claim they have not seen it.