Environmental degradation at Lake Urmia (Iran): exploring the causes and their impacts on rural livelihoods

During the last 20 years, Lake Urmia, once recognised as one of the largest hypersaline lakes on the planet, has suffered from severe environmental degradation. As a result of climate change and human activities, the lake has been largely desiccated. Previous work around the unfolding environmental disaster mainly focused on Lake Urmia’s water regime, water level fluctuations, crisis causes and possible actions to revive its fortunes. However, there has been little discussion on the prevailing socio-economic consequences for rural livelihoods affected by the disaster. This paper investigates the impacts of the desiccation on rural households and analyses the occurrence and different forms of local villagers’ coping strategies. We present the findings of field research in the region, whereby open and semi-structured interviews, with both regional experts from different institutions and local residents, were conducted. Evidence from this study suggests that rural communities near the lake are considerably dependent on the lake basin’s ecosystem services, such as water availability, clean air, soil and local climate regulation—all of which are heavily threatened by progressive environmental degradation. In particular, tourism decline and losses in agriculture have already led to emigration to larger cities, presenting challenges for both rural and urban infrastructures. Overall, the vulnerability of rural households to the crisis was found to be high for reasons such as poverty, lack of income alternatives and a lack of institutional mitigation and adaptation policies.