Drought Pump
Over the past centuries, intermittent droughts in the central plateau of Iran played a crucial role in social and cultural dynamics. The local communities responded to climate change with three different strategies, proportional to the magnitude of water
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Drought Pump
Abstract Over the past centuries, intermittent droughts in the central plateau of Iran played a crucial role in social and cultural dynamics. The local communities responded to climate change with three different strategies, proportional to the magnitude of water scarcity. During a wet period, they expanded the area of their cultivated lands with a variety of crops and they let less lands lie fallow. When a year turned dry, they shrank the area of farmlands and let more lands lie fallow and resorted to a cropping pattern with lower water demand, and eventually modified their water division systems. With more environmental pressure, they put more focus on local industries, which could supplement their fickle agricultural economy. During the two former stages, population could be still fed and sustained by a mixed economy swaying between agriculture, local industries and trading. However, there was a third stage when aridness crossed the tolerance line of the society, and then even the offset economy did not help. In this case, part of the population began to overflow and migrate to the more favorable regions, spreading their skills already evolved under environmental strains. When a wet period followed the drought, the remaining population gradually returned to agriculture that brought about more food, and as a result population grew again. But the next drought came around and this cycle continued. This cycle can be called “drought pump” whose environmental and cultural mechanism will be examined in this chapter.
5.1
Introduction
Drought-induced migrations have not been limited to history, but they are still occurring nowadays regardless of their cultural dimension. In modern days, the recurring droughts and their societal issues have taken on new dimensions, which may lead to many acute social and political crises and eventually “hydraulic collapse”. Here, hydraulic collapse means a situation when socio-economic and political structures fall into an irreversible disorder that is in the first place triggered by water resources crisis. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Labbaf Khaneiki, Cultural Dynamics of Water in Iranian Civilization, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58900-4_5
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5 Drought Pump
Now the growing environmental migration in different parts of the Iranian plateau is alarming. For example, in the province of Southern Khurasan, rural settlements comprise 61.76% of the province’s population in 1996, whereas this number dropped to 45.61% in 2011 in the wake of climate change along with other factors (Ebrahim Zadeh and Esmaeel Nejad 2017, p. 16). The eastern and southeastern provinces were struck by persistent droughts most severely; the provinces of Sistan & Baluchistan, Kerman and Southern Khurasan. According to some studies, since the mid-1990s a dramatic decline in precipitation has affected the Iranian plateau especially the aforementioned provinces, where a decrease of only 1 mm would directly infl
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