Here is a stark story from Scientific American about the need to move the capital of Iran from Tehran to another location with more water. The reason is a combination of lingering drought caused by warming temperatures due to climate change and significant overuse of the aquifers underneath the city to provide both drinking water and irrigation water for agriculture. The land over the aquifers is dropping by a rate of about 35 centimeters a year. That is about a foot per year that the ground is falling! Even if the rain returned, the structure of the aquifer has changed due to the removal of water and it cannot be restored to its past capacity. This is a story that is also occurring in many other places, including the main agricultural region of California, which currently provides a lot of our domestic vegetables, fruit, and other goods like cotton. In the future, those commodities will need to come from other areas that still have water available for irrigation and public use.
