Shirin Hakim: Iran's Environmental Challenge

Dr. Jon Alterman: Shirin Hakim is the head of the Environment, Climate Security, and Public Health unit at the Center for Middle East and Global Order, a new Berlin headquartered think-tank. She's an Iranian American scholar of environmental policy and sustainable development in Iran and the Middle East and North Africa region. Shirin, welcome to Babel.

Shirin Hakim: Thank you for having me, Jon.

Dr. Alterman: You've thought a lot about environmental issues in Iran. What is the environmental picture in Iran right now?

Ms. Hakim: Despite Iran's vast natural endowments, the country currently faces a host of environmental challenges that threaten its sustainable development potential. While Iran's environmental crisis has been exacerbated by the impacts of climate change, the main culprit of the current environmental decline is environmental changes induced by human activity. There are three significant environmental issues worth highlighting.

The first is the water crisis which has been exacerbated by decades of isolation, mismanagement of local resources, and the consequences of a prolonged drought. Additionally, the overexploitation of ground and surface water has contributed to the desiccation of local bodies of water, dwindling groundwater reserves, desertification, and land subsidence. All of this is exacerbated by Iran's inefficient agricultural sector, which consumes roughly 90 percent of the country's water sources. Despite declining water availability, Iran's agricultural sector has been pushed to expand to fulfill growing food demands.

The second issue facing Iran is air pollution. Iranian cities, provoked by the use of poorly refined petroleum and the use of outmoded vehicles, routinely rank among the world's most polluted. Air quality has also worsened as a result of the increased frequency of dust and sandstorms in recent years. That's not only a local issue but a regional issue. Air pollution has led to the closure of businesses and schools in Iran, particularly in the winter months, contributed to health conditions, and has had stark implications for economic productivity.

The last environmental issue is urbanization and demographic changes. Iran continues to experience a growing population, which has in the last 50 years tripled to over 85 million people. As a result of Iran's environmental decline, many Iranians, including farmers have migrated to larger cities, despite the pollution and congestion, to find work and improve their living standards. Today, more than 70 percent of Iran's population resides in cities, and this is placing greater ecological stress on its urban areas. 

Dr. Alterman: You've written a lot about how U.S. and multilateral sanctions on Iran have made these problems even worse than they'd otherwise be. How does that work?

Ms. Hakim: Firstly, it's difficult to distinguish the degree to which sanctions triggered damage to Iran and to what degree it was catalyzed by the government. It's unlikely that a country like Iran, with a long record of mismanagement and human rights violations, would prioritize its environment even without sanctions.

With that being said, we have to acknowledge that sanctions have acted as a considerable and ongoing external shock for the last 44 years that have influenced policymaking decisions in Iran. There is no causal association between sanctions and environmental degradation because environmental outcomes are the result of various compounding factors. Ultimately, environmental management was at the discretion of Iranian leaders. In my research, sanctions are understood as a shock to the system of a targeted state. Policymakers largely undermine that sanctioned states are dynamic and not static, and they have intricate economic, social, and environmental variables at play that respond to changes and shocks to the system like sanctions.

When sanctions intensified on Iran, there were four key direct impacts on the economy that disrupted environmental management. The first was banking complications which rendered essential trade and international aid difficult to administer to Iran. The second is divestments of international companies from the Iranian market and difficulties for Iran to attract foreign direct investments. The third is the difficulty for Iran in importing sustainable and clean technologies, partly because some fell under the dual-use item category—which are technologies or goods that have both civilian and wartime uses and were restricted. The fourth point is severed opportunities for Iran to engage in the exchange of education and expertise with the global community. These consequences generated responses from actors in the Iran system to sustain its weakened economy. We can consider these responses as coping mechanisms that compounded corruption, mismanagement of the environment and the economy, and the impacts of climate change.

Many of the coping mechanisms Iran resorted to under sanctions to sustain its economy and prove to the West that it could defy sanctions came at the cost of natural resource strain and exploitation as Iran turned inwards and pursued self-sufficiency schemes. This is the main finding of my work: the secondary impacts of sanctions can act as catalysts to induce difficulties for sustainable development in a sanctioned country. It's a complex and dynamic process that depends highly on the distinct context of the targeted nation.

Dr. Alterman: Can you give me an example of how sanctions have been a catalyst for environmental degradation? 

Ms. Hakim: One example of a coping mechanism that is associated with sanctions was in 2010 when Iranians were consuming roughly 70 million liters per day of gasoline, but the country's refineries were capable of producing only around 40 million liters. Though Iran is oil rich, it did not have the local capacity to refine oil to meet domestic demands, and it would rely on European partners to refine the oil and then reimport petroleum to meet domestic demands. The U.S. CISADA sanctions in 2010 placed restrictions on firms involved in energy investments in Iran, the sale of refined petroleum to the country, and financial transactions with select Iranian banks. The Ahmadinejad administration resorted to coping mechanisms to meet local demands by employing short-term fixes where existing oil refineries were forced to run above full capacity and without regular maintenance. The government also resorted to transforming some petrol chemical factories into oil refineries where very poor quality petroleum was generated—called pyrolysis.

Pyrolysis is a byproduct of crude oil when fed into petrochemical factories, and it can be used as a synthetic fuel, but the locally produced petroleum contained ten times the level of contaminants of imported fuel, which resulted in damage to automotive engines and worsened air quality. Ultimately, it led to stark health ramifications for the public.

This example illustrates how sanctions do not directly result in environmental degradation and that, ultimately, these decisions were at the discretion of the Iranian government which wanted to maintain business as usual instead of focusing on declining demands.

The secondary impacts of sanctions acted as a catalyst, to create conditions where the exploitation of natural resources became more attractive to the Iranian government to sustain its weakened economy.

Dr. Alterman: How grumpy do Iranians get about bad air or insufficient water? As you suggested, many farmers are also seeing rivers drying up and pumps don't have water to pump. Does that create a certain social movement, and does it even destabilize the country as we've seen protests in Iran in the fall? Are there ways in which the environmental degradation made those protests more dangerous for the government of Iran?

Ms. Hakim: In recent years, we've seen an increased frequency of protests because of water scarcity throughout the country. In 2019, there were subsidy cuts that provoked large protests throughout the country. Clearly, the environment is highly linked to potential threats to instability in the country. This is becoming increasingly a reality in Iran. In regard to the Iranian government, they've largely undermined the potential for environmental issues to contribute to instability. They've consistently prioritized economic gains over environmental sustainability. Iranians are very well aware of the environmental decline in the country, even though the government has recurrently tried to suppress environmental activism. If you travel there, especially in the winter months, people will be wearing masks on the streets because of air pollution issues.

Water scarcity is not an isolated issue—it's impacting rural and urban settings. It's definitely part of the concerns of the general public and if we don't see significant reforms to the systemic inefficiencies of the Islamic Republic, it's likely to act as a threat multiplier in the future and add to existing social tensions in the country. As of now, the Woman Life Freedom movement was largely driven by Generation Z, and it has brought to the streets a largely young population. But environmental issues have the potential to mobilize a different demographic of people that we have not seen necessarily contributing to these protests. That threat is there and it's something that The Islamic Republic should take into consideration and prioritize.

Dr. Alterman: There are going to be some people in the U.S. government who argue that more social pressure on the Iranian government is good. The way you solve the Iran problems, from the nuclear issue to the human rights issues to the economic issues to everything else, is to move beyond the Islamic Republic and have a new government. Therefore, the last thing we should be doing, this argument would be, is alleviating pressure on the Iranian government. Instead, we should double down on pressure on the Iranian government. How do you respond to that sort of logic chain?

Ms. Hakim: One misconception about this research is that sanctions have acted as an impediment to sustainable development in Iran. That's also largely because of the coping mechanisms I described—the decisions that the Iranian government has taken to sustain its economy through the exploitation of natural resources. Observing the Islamic Republic over the past few decades, we know that this is a government that has never really prioritized the environment and, even since its inception, has prioritized empowering its rural populace and empowering farmers by manipulating the natural flow of water and investing heavily in accelerated development to empower its economy with little consideration to the environment.

When we discuss concessions or transformation of sanctions in the context of Iran and whether that will result in improvements in Iran's environmental performance, that's highly unlikely unless there are significant changes within the Iranian system and in the way they deal with environmental issues. The main culprit of the environmental decline in Iran is not sanctions but decades of mismanagement that's been exhibited by the Islamic Republic.

Dr. Alterman: If the United States wanted to play a constructive role in relieving environmental pressures on Iran, what should it do?

Ms. Hakim: There are several ways that the United States can improve in terms of imposing sanctions on Iran. For example, exploring, sovereign mechanisms for environmental trade similar to the financial special purpose vehicle mechanism for humanitarian trade, could be useful and encourage the development of case-by-case waivers issued by the U.S. OFAC. The crucial exchange of clean technologies can promote technology and knowledge exchange with Iran that will ultimately benefit the environment.

Another thing that could be useful is if there's the formation of a monitoring committee on sanctioned countries that can oversee the social and environmental impacts on a target state. This would be useful in mitigating the detrimental impact sanctions could have on a targeted state that may also have spillover effects in other countries. This is important because the environmental issues that are emanating in Iran can have spillover effects that will on its neighbors and the world.

The United States is a significant player in attaining the global climate goals and we have to be more critical of where our traditional forms of imposing foreign policy and sanctions may be counteracting these larger goals that we've set for climate.

Dr. Alterman: Let me ask a little bit about how you came to these issues. You were not born in Iran, but you were born to Iranian parents living in the Caribbean. You then went back to Iran and worked for a while. How did you find Iran? How did you get interested in environmental issues in Iran, and how did your on-the-ground experience affect how you work on these issues from outside of Iran now?

Ms. Hakim: I've always been fascinated with Iran since I was young. The first time I traveled to the country I was 17, and I was consumed by the beauty of the country but also very aware that the development potential of the country was limited by mismanagement. In the years of escalation of multilateral sanctions during my trips there, I noticed that my friends and family would commonly cite sanctions as an impediment to sustainable development. This sparked my interest and when I embarked on my Ph.D., the JCPOA had just been implemented and many had hoped that Iran's economy would remain open to the West. There was a lot of discussion over sustainable development projects and companies entering Iran's economy because of its huge potential.

I started studying this topic and early on I found that there was a paucity of research on sanctions and their impact on sustainable development and the environment, not only in the context of Iran but on a global level. I also found that, in 2015, Iran's intended nationally determined contributions submitted to the Paris Climate Conference mentioned sanctions seven times in the 10-page document as an impediment to sustainable development. The Iranian government was consistently referencing sanctions as an impediment, but there was not any scholarly work to substantiate these claims. I became increasingly interested in trying to understand whether this was a reality or whether it was an excuse that the Iranian government was using to minimize its accountability for the environmental issues in the country.

Dr. Alterman: It sounds like your conclusion is that it's a little bit of both.

Ms. Hakim: As I mentioned, the blame lies ultimately in the hands of the Iranian government, but what's significant from the findings of this research is that sanctions do create difficulties for a targeted state, especially one like Iran which has been under the imposition of sanctions for decades. What's novel about this research is that for years individuals who have been crafting sanctions and imposing sanctions have undermined the adaptive capacity that sanctioned countries have to adapt to their conditions and find ways to evade sanctions.

This is where the problem arises. These coping mechanisms that are undertaken by sanctioned states often align with autarkic policies that necessitate these countries turn inwards and increase their natural resource dependence. This is something that's of concern in the future, when, sanctions policy is crafted. In our increasingly interconnected world where environmental issues are of shared international importance, we should be concerned about how our foreign policy may be failing the environment and establishing mechanisms to mitigate potential detriments that sanctions may pose to the environment.

Dr. Alterman: Shirin Hakim from the Center for Middle East and Global Order, thank you very much for joining us on Babel.

Ms. Hakim: Thank you.