The Middle East's Looming Water Crisis: Desalination, Drought, and War

In the Middle East, there is something more precious than oil. It is not gold, nor any other mineral hauled out of the ground. It is water — the most ordinary substance imaginable, and in this corner of the world, the most fragile foundation a society can rest on.

The numbers are startling. The average person in the Middle East uses roughly 560 litres of water a day, more than three times the world average of about 180 litres. Yet this is a region with the lowest average annual water availability per person on Earth, according to the World Bank — and even that grim ranking may understate the problem. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace counts 16 of the world’s 25 most water-stressed countries within the Middle East and North Africa, with Bahrain sitting at the very top of the list.

People in the region understand how precarious this is. “We are, at the end of the day, in a desert,” a resident of the United Arab Emirates named Sofia told CNN. Oil and gas may sit at the heart of the economy, she said, but water is the basis of survival.

That survival is now under threat from two forces converging at once: climate change, which is making an already-dry region hotter and drier, and a gigantic war engulfing Iran that has begun to put the region’s water infrastructure directly in the line of fire. This is the story of how the Gulf engineered its way out of scarcity — and why that hard-won security is suddenly looking dangerously thin.

Saltwater Kingdoms

Before oil, the Gulf was among the poorest regions in the world. At the end of the First World War, the population of present-day Saudi Arabia numbered somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million, while Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait together held roughly 175,000 people. The economy revolved around pearl diving, subsistence farming along the coasts, and nomadic life in the interior. The only foreigners were merchants from neighbouring regions and India who traded with local dealers, plus seasonal workers in the fishing and pearling trades.

Then came oil — first in Bahrain in 1932, then almost like dominoes: Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in 1938, Qatar in 1940, and the UAE in 1958. The discovery transformed these sparsely populated kingdoms almost overnight. Through the 1970s and 1980s, large-scale migration of guest workers arrived in response to rising oil prices and ambitious development plans. But while oil money could buy salaries, roads, skyscrapers, and airports, there was one thing it could not do.

The Invention That Made the Desert Liveable

Oil could not conjure water from thin air. The Gulf’s population boom would have collapsed without desalination — the process that turns the sea into usable freshwater. It works in one of two ways: heating seawater until it evaporates, leaving the salt behind before condensing the vapour back into liquid; or forcing seawater through fine membranes at high pressure to filter out the minerals. Either way, it is costly and energy-intensive. But that was never a problem as long as the oil revenue kept flowing.

Michael Christopher Low, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah, told CNN that the Gulf countries have become “saltwater kingdoms,” describing them as global superpowers in the production of drinkable water from the sea. The numbers back that up. In Kuwait and Oman, desalination supplies around 90% of the water residents use; Bahrain relies on it for 85% and Saudi Arabia for about 70%.

Major cities — Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha, Kuwait City, and Jeddah — are now almost wholly dependent on desalinated water. That manufactured water feeds the region’s lush golf courses, vast water parks, indoor ski slopes, and sprawling hotel complexes, the kind of spectacle that would otherwise be impossible in one of the driest places on Earth.

When Diversification Makes Things Thirstier

As Gulf states try to wean their economies off pure oil dependence, access to desalinated water becomes more important still — because some of the industries they are chasing are extraordinarily thirsty. Consider data centres, which have proven especially popular in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The servers that run artificial intelligence and cloud computing generate enormous heat, and in a region where summer temperatures routinely exceed 45 degrees Celsius, cooling them demands vast amounts of water, most of it desalinated.

Projections from Mordor Intelligence, a market research firm, suggest the region will need 426 billion litres of water annually by 2030 just to cool its data centres. In other words, the very economic future these countries are betting on will deepen their dependence on the same manufactured water that is already stretched thin. The challenge facing desalination is not shrinking. It is compounding, year by year, as ambition outpaces the underlying supply.

A Warming Trap

The first pressure is the climate. The Gulf is warming at a rate that might politely be called alarming. A 2021 study by the American Meteorological Society found temperatures in the region rising 50% faster than the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. If the current trend holds, average temperatures in parts of the Middle East could climb by four degrees Celsius by 2050.

Extreme heatwaves have already become routine. Temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius have been recorded in Kuwait, and a research paper in the Marine Pollution Bulletin documented a sea-surface temperature of 37.6 degrees Celsius in Kuwait Bay — possibly a world record. This matters for desalination because the process depends heavily on energy. Higher air and sea temperatures reduce the efficiency of the power plants that run these facilities, forcing them to burn more fuel to produce the same amount of water.

That fuel-burning carries its own cost. Desalination plants worldwide produce between 500 and 850 million tonnes of carbon emissions annually. On the higher end, that is nearly as much as the roughly 880 million tonnes emitted by the entire global aviation industry — widely regarded as one of the most carbon-intensive sectors anywhere.

There is a bitter irony here. The fossil fuels powering desalination contribute to the climate change that makes the region hotter, which in turn makes desalination less efficient, requiring still more fuel to produce the same volume of water. The heat also drives higher evaporation, so crops and cities need more water at exactly the moment when producing it becomes harder. Droughts could grow longer, deeper, and more frequent, while the frequency of dust storms in the Middle East could double by 2050 — all of it piling pressure onto plants already straining at capacity.

The Aquifers Are Running Dry

Groundwater offers little relief. The Middle East has very little to begin with, and what exists is vanishing fast. Saudi Arabia uses 80% of its water for agriculture, with groundwater extraction accounting for most of that demand. But these aquifers are being drained far faster than nature can replenish them.

According to a UN report, water tables in parts of Saudi Arabia have dropped by as much as six metres a year since the 1980s — fast enough that hydrologists believe some aquifers could be depleted within decades, with rapid urbanisation only accelerating the decline.

Then there is seawater intrusion. A NASA-led study found that seawater will infiltrate underground freshwater supplies in about three of every four coastal areas worldwide by the year 2100. As sea levels rise and groundwater tables drop from overextraction, saltwater pushes further inland, contaminating aquifers and rendering them useless for drinking or agriculture. This creates a vicious cycle: as groundwater turns too salty to use, demand shifts even more heavily onto desalination plants, straining infrastructure already running near capacity.

None of these problems can be solved quickly. Building new plants takes years, and switching to renewable energy will require massive investment and time — especially since only 1% of desalination plants are currently powered by low-carbon energy sources. Yet all of these issues can at least be addressed, given enough time, money, and technological advancement. The plants are there, and as long as they remain standing, the problems are solvable. The same cannot be said for the war.

The War in Iran

Even before the first bombs dropped, Iran was already facing a water crisis. For years the country had struggled with a drought that experts agree was made far more severe by climate change and decades of mismanagement. Rivers that once sustained ancient settlements have been drying up. Groundwater reserves have been extracted far beyond natural replenishment, with over 70% of major aquifers considered overdrawn.

The situation became so dire that the capital’s main reservoirs recently held less than 15 million cubic metres of water — barely enough for two weeks of supply. The government has even discussed relocating Tehran, a city of 10 million, to the coast, because the capital’s water situation had become untenable. Then came the war, and with it, the start of a wider Middle East water crisis.

On Saturday, the 7th of March, Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi accused the United States of attacking a desalination plant on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off water to 30 villages. Araghchi called the attack “a blatant and desperate crime,” adding ominously: “The US set this precedent, not Iran.” The next day, on the other side of the Gulf, Bahrain announced that one of its own desalination plants had been damaged, with all fingers pointing at Iran.

The Most Dangerous Pressure Point

The exchange immediately raised fears of a broader escalation. For decades, security experts have warned that desalination infrastructure represents one of the most dangerous pressure points in any Middle East conflict. A leaked 2008 US diplomatic cable from Riyadh warned that Saudi Arabia’s capital would have to be evacuated within a week if the Jubail desalination plant were seriously damaged. The Jubail complex supplies more than 90% of Riyadh’s drinking water.

These fears are not new. Back in 1983, the CIA warned that disruption of desalination facilities in most Arab countries could have more serious consequences than the loss of any other industry or commodity. The agency also noted that Tehran had, at the time, assured its Arab neighbours it would not attack their desalination plants. As Bahrain has now discovered, that assurance no longer seems to hold.

That the Islamic Republic would turn out to be the kind of actor that does not keep its promises is hardly a revelation. The genuinely new development of this conflict may be that the US and Israel also struck an Iranian desalination plant. Thankfully, these two strikes have so far been the limit of attacks on water infrastructure — at least for now.

Strategic Restraint, and How It Could Break

The restraint observed so far may reflect what Nima Shokri, an expert in geo-hydroinformatics at the Hamburg University of Technology, described as “strategic restraint” in an interview with The Guardian. That restraint matters because, as Christian Henderson, a Middle East expert at Leiden University, told Middle East Eye, Iran could quite easily strike its neighbours’ desalination plants — but the cost would be very high.

That restraint may not last. According to an exclusive report by Reuters, US intelligence indicates that Iran’s leadership remains largely intact — minus an ayatollah or two — and is not at risk of collapse any time soon, even after nearly two weeks of relentless American and Israeli bombardment. A senior Israeli official told the outlet that Jerusalem had privately reached a similar conclusion: there was no certainty the war would topple the clerical government.

Because of this, there is a distinct possibility that Washington and Jerusalem could conclude that targeting desalination plants offers their best chance of provoking a popular uprising against Tehran. If that happens, Iran could feel justified in retaliating in kind against American allies in the region, turning what has so far been a limited exchange of strikes against water infrastructure into something far more devastating. On the flipside, the longer the war drags on, the more the regime in Tehran might feel compelled to play whatever cards it has left. Oil and gas infrastructure and international shipping have already been hit; if Iran believes its strategy of inflicting massive economic pain on US allies is working, Gulf desalination plants may become an attractive target.

Toxic Rain

For Iran, the threat to its water supply goes beyond the destruction of desalination plants. The country draws most of its water from rivers, reservoirs, and underground aquifers rather than the sea. But all of these sources are now at risk from something that fell from the sky one recent weekend: toxic rain.

On a Saturday night, Israeli strikes hit oil storage facilities in and around Tehran, setting off fires so massive that residents described the scenes as apocalyptic. Flames shot into the air, and thick plumes of black smoke covered the sky. Then the rain came, and it was black. Residents reported difficulty breathing, dizziness, and burning sensations as it fell relentlessly.

The rain drew parallels to the 1991 Kuwaiti oil fires, when the Iraqi military set fire to hundreds of oil wells during the Gulf War, causing similar black rain.

Peter Ross, a senior scientist at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation in Sidney, British Columbia, told CBC that the fallout had the potential to seriously threaten public health and the safety of drinking water for quite a while, with fisheries and agriculture also at risk. Bryan Berger, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Virginia, concurred, telling ABC News that in addition to hydrocarbons and other toxic compounds, “forever chemicals” likely present in materials such as the flame retardants built into the facilities could contaminate groundwater, easily become airborne, and end up back in the rain. The toxins would not disappear over time; they would cycle through soil, water, and air, compounding the damage. For a country already teetering on the edge of water bankruptcy before the first bomb fell, this could be catastrophic.

Is a Water Crisis Inevitable?

So far the picture has been bleak. Climate change is making the Middle East hotter and drier. Groundwater is being depleted faster than it can be replenished. Desalination plants, the lifeline of the region, are energy-intensive and vulnerable to strikes. And a war is now raging that threatens the very infrastructure millions rely on. So the question must be asked: is a water crisis actually inevitable?

The honest answer is that it depends on what happens next. Setting the war aside for a moment, there are concrete steps the region can take to ease the pressure on its water systems. Agriculture consumes roughly 75% of the water used in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, and much of it is wasted through inefficient irrigation. Studies in the UAE have found that 60% of water from traditional sprinkler systems evaporates before it even reaches the plants.

Gulf countries could adopt drip irrigation, which has been shown to cut water usage by up to 50%. Israel has already proven it works at scale, and the Gulf states have both the resources and the incentive to follow suit.

Rethinking What the Desert Grows

Beyond irrigation reform, the Middle East may need to rethink what it grows. Governments have long subsidised crops such as wheat in pursuit of food security, even though producing them in a desert climate often requires massive irrigation and unsustainable groundwater use. Shifting to less water-intensive crops like sorghum and barley, and importing staples from countries with more abundant water supplies, would be more sustainable in the long run. Politically, this is a hard sell.

But the alternative is continuing to drain aquifers that cannot be refilled.

These solutions will not work overnight. But they represent a path toward sustainability that requires no technological breakthroughs — only the political will to implement them. The same cannot be said for the war. As the conflict rages on, the best one can hope for is that military planners on all sides understand the stakes of targeting water infrastructure. International law explicitly prohibits attacks on infrastructure critical to the survival of the civilian population, including drinking water systems.

As Peter Gleick, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, wrote in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Water must never be a target or weapon of war.” Sadly, the world increasingly seems to live in an age of impunity, one in which the rule of law and the lives of civilians slide steadily down the list of things that powerful leaders appear to care about. There is reason to hope restraint continues in this conflict — but everything about 2026 so far counsels against optimism. Water, the most ordinary thing in the world, may yet prove to be the most consequential.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does the Middle East face such a severe water crisis? The region has the lowest average annual water availability per person on Earth, according to the World Bank, yet the average resident uses about 560 litres a day — more than three times the global average of 180 litres. The Carnegie Endowment counts 16 of the world’s 25 most water-stressed countries in the MENA region, with Bahrain at the top. Climate change, groundwater depletion, and now war are intensifying the strain.

What is desalination and how dependent is the Gulf on it? Desalination turns seawater into usable freshwater, either by heating it until it evaporates and leaves the salt behind, or by forcing it through fine membranes at high pressure. The Gulf is heavily dependent: it supplies about 90% of water in Kuwait and Oman, 85% in Bahrain, and 70% in Saudi Arabia. Cities including Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha, Kuwait City, and Jeddah are now almost wholly reliant on it.

How does climate change worsen the desalination problem? The Gulf is warming roughly 50% faster than the rest of the Northern Hemisphere. Higher air and sea temperatures reduce the efficiency of the power plants running desalination facilities, forcing them to burn more fuel for the same output. That extra fuel adds to the emissions driving the warming — a self-reinforcing loop. The heat also raises evaporation and demand at the exact moment producing water gets harder.

Why is water infrastructure such a dangerous target in conflict? Because so much of the region’s population depends on a small number of plants. A leaked 2008 US cable warned Riyadh would need evacuating within a week if the Jubail plant — which supplies over 90% of the capital’s drinking water — were seriously damaged. As early as 1983, the CIA warned that disrupting desalination facilities could be worse than losing any other industry or commodity.

What happened with the “toxic rain” over Tehran? Israeli strikes hit oil storage facilities in and around Tehran, igniting fires so large that residents called the scenes apocalyptic, with thick black smoke covering the sky. Black rain followed, and people reported difficulty breathing, dizziness, and burning sensations. Scientists warned the fallout — including hydrocarbons and “forever chemicals” from flame retardants — could contaminate groundwater and threaten drinking water, fisheries, and agriculture for a long time.

Has Iran or its neighbours actually attacked water plants? Yes. Iran’s foreign minister accused the United States of attacking a desalination plant on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz, cutting water to 30 villages. The next day Bahrain reported one of its own plants damaged, blaming Iran. Experts say Iran could strike its neighbours’ plants relatively easily, but the cost would be high — which may explain the “strategic restraint” observed so far.

Can the crisis be averted? Partially, and only with political will. Agriculture uses roughly 75% of water in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, much of it wasted; drip irrigation could cut usage by up to 50%, as Israel has shown at scale. Shifting from thirsty subsidised crops like wheat to sorghum and barley, and importing more staples, would also help. These fixes need no new technology — but they take time, and the war does not.

Sources

• CNN — Gulf, Iran war, water and desalination
• World Bank — In MENA, make every drop of water count
• The Wall Street Journal — Why the Middle East’s desalination plants are critical
• The Times of India — The Iran war’s hidden crisis: why water could matter more than oil
• Archive.is
• Euronews — Serious water crisis on horizon as Middle East’s desalination plants hit and acid rain falls
• Carnegie Endowment — The looming climate and water crisis in the Middle East and North Africa
• ScienceDirect
• The Conversation — Iran’s biggest centres of protest are also experiencing extreme pollution and water shortages
• The Guardian — Severe water stress: why desalination plants are the Gulf’s greatest weakness
• Reuters — US intelligence says Iran government is not at risk of collapse, sources say
• The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — Desalination, water, and war