Rehabilitation of qanats should be put on the agenda and the issue, unlike in the past, has drawn the attention of the Energy Ministry, the agriculture minister said Tuesday.
“The government is paying special attention to watershed management and we must solve problems in the key agricultural sector,” ISNA quoted Mahmoud Hojjati as saying.
It is being reported that policy and decision makers are gradually realizing that environmental sustainability, among other things, demands revival of qanats. “This is an indication that they are finally paying attention to this issue after decades,” Hojjati added.
Located in an arid and semi arid region, Iran has suffered from drought and extreme water deficits for decades.
Despite heavy rains in recent months, officials are still concerned with water scarcity and plead for judicious consumption, especially in the agriculture sector where amazingly huge amounts of the precious resource are wasted.
For centuries, human societies in dry lands have overcome the challenge of water scarcity through traditional methods of water harvesting. Qanat technology is one.
Qanat is the generic term for an ancient environmentally sustainable water harvesting and conveyance technique believed to have originated in Persia in the early first millennium B.C.
The qanat system consists of a network of underground canals that transport water from aquifers in highlands to the surface at lower levels by gravity.
While qanat systems cannot replace modern advances in water resources management, they still have a role to play as a sustainable groundwater management tool.
There are almost 34,000 qanats in the country, which if revived, can help curb water shortages in many dry regions like the provincial capital city of Yazd that is believed to be the hottest region north of the Persian Gulf and is Iran’s driest metropolis.
A few decades ago, residents of the parched province relied heavily on qanats to meet their daily water needs.
Many qanats have fallen into disrepair or have dried up. Many of those that remain are threatened by silt sedimentation in canals, urban migration of youth and the shortage of experts and skilled people for managing such systems.
