Promoting judicious water consumption is no more workable in tackling the worsening water crisis, nor costly methods such as cloud seeding can help, says a water expert.
Esmail Shahbazi said instead wastewater treatment and use of the recycled water in the agricultural and industrial sectors can be effective in lowering water consumption.
In the current situation the government should play a more effective role in water management and recycling wastewater should be among its main priorities, ISNA quoted him as saying.
Currently 194 wastewater treatment plants are operational with a total sewage treatment capacity of 10.3 million cubic meters per day.
Recycling wastewater has increasingly come under the spotlight in recent years as the country continues to grapple with perennial drought that has left large swathes of land barren and is forcing large numbers to abandon rural areas as the business of farming and agriculture comes to a standstill wiping out livelihoods.
So far 62,755km of wastewater pipelines have been laid across the country and 300 cities are connected to the wastewater network.
An estimated 34 million people in urban areas are facing water problems, 17 million of whom live in regions with alarming water deficits.
This means that the expansion of wastewater treatment plants is lagging behind what is actually required now and in the near future. Moreover, wastewater treatment facilities in rural areas are underdeveloped.
Iran is situated in an arid and semi-arid region and average precipitation rate has fallen to levels way below the global average while underground water resources are drying up at terrible speed.
Water security is also threatened by the destructive habit of waste and overconsumption that seems to be implacable despite warnings and wakeup calls.
Massive amounts of water are wasted every year due to unsustainable farming practices and lack of technology to recycle effluent for farming.
According to statistics, Iran’s water recycling in agriculture is below 50%. Almost 90% of the scarce water resources are consumed by the inefficient and dilapidated agriculture sector.
