The Hydropolitical Power in the Middle East: Understanding Sovereignty Challenges Under a Changing Climate

Water in the Middle East transcends its role as a natural resource, underpinning state sovereignty, regional power, and national security. Climate change is intensifying droughts, altering precipitation, and amplifying extremes, pushing limited water resources toward crisis. This study examines how geopolitical influence increasingly aligns with the flow of rivers rather than political borders. Integrating climate variables such as temperature, precipitation, snow mass and runoff derived from CMIP6 projections (1980–2100; SSP2–4.5 and SSP5–8.5 scenarios) and ERA5 reanalysis, alongside governance indicators, water management frameworks, transboundary agreements, and scenario-based policy analysis, the study explores how climatic and institutional factors jointly shape regional resilience. In this study, we compare future climate conditions to a baseline period (1980–2014). The future periods considered are 2021–2050, 2051–2080, and 2081–2100. The results indicate a persistent snow drought beginning in the early 2000s, marked by reduced snowpack despite normal or above-average precipitation. Rising temperatures have increasingly shifted snowfall to rainfall during the baseline period, and this trend is projected to intensify across future warming periods. This shift diminishes seasonal snow storage, the region’s key natural water reservoir, weakening spring and summer river discharge. The resulting decline in snow mass threatens irrigation, hydropower, and urban water supplies while heightening transboundary tensions. By linking physical climate modeling with governance perspectives, the study demonstrates that water management and adaptive policy responses will determine future stability and cooperation in the region. Ultimately, the findings underscore that in a warming Middle East, control over water resources and mitigation strategies not territory will define geopolitical power and resilience.

Focusing on Iran’s transboundary basins, the Helmand and Harirrud in the east, the Tigris–Euphrates in the west, and the Aras in the northwest, this study shows how climate variability, snow drought, and upstream interventions have reshaped ecological and political relations. In the Helmand Basin, upstream dam construction in Afghanistan and prolonged droughts have reduced Iran’s downstream flows to a fraction of treaty levels, desiccating the Hamun wetlands and fueling border tensions over the past two decades. In western Iran, climate change and large-scale water projects have degraded both water quality and quantity, transforming scarcity into a source of protest and instability in recent years. Similarly, industrial pollution in the Aras River has turned a formerly cooperative basin into an arena of environmental and diplomatic friction. Looking ahead, future droughts are projected to intensify hydropolitical tensions, aggravating ecological degradation, inequality, and unrest especially in border regions of the Middle East countries such as Khuzestan, Kurdistan, Sistan and Baluchestan provinces of Iran. As water insecurity deepens, two conflict pathways emerge: scarcity-driven social instability and the strategic use of water as a tool of power. The findings highlight a growing hydropolitical security complex, where hydrological interdependence, rather than territory, defines sovereignty, stability, and regional influence in a warming Middle East.