Some of the documents on the huge costs of restoring Lake Urmia are "not available".

The head of the Environment Faction of the Islamic Consultative Assembly reported the lack of transparency in the costs incurred under the guise of restoring Lake Urmia, saying that some of the "documents for the huge costs of restoring Lake Urmia are not available."

In an interview with ILNA news agency on Tuesday, September 5, Somayeh Rafiei said that "a lot of expenses have been incurred to restore Lake Urmia, some of which are documented and others are not, but these expenses did not yield the desired results."

The head of the Environment Faction of the Islamic Consultative Assembly added: "Most of the expenses were spent on repetitive and fruitless studies, and in practice what should have happened did not happen."

Despite various government officials emphasizing the impact of droughts on the drying up of the world's second-salt lake, Somayeh Rafiei stated on Tuesday that "according to the former head of the Lake Urmia Restoration Task Force, 85 percent of the reasons for the current state of Lake Urmia are related to human intervention and only 15 percent are due to climate change."

He emphasized: "Before restoring this lake, we should have adopted a comprehensive plan for protection, but not only did protection not occur, but destruction increased, and wrong decisions were made, including unauthorized harvesting for agricultural development and changing the type of cultivation."

While experts say that 95 percent of Lake Urmia has dried up, Masoud Tajrishi, former director of the Planning Office of the Lake Urmia Restoration Headquarters, recently announced that the 13th government has stopped providing information for planning the lake's restoration.

Mr. Tajrishi said that he does not know what plan the 13th government has for reviving the lake because none of the 24 letters from the Urmia Lake Revival Committee have been answered.

Concerns about the condition of Lake Urmia date back to 1990, when some experts and even government officials warned about the effects of drought on Lake Urmia.

In response to these concerns, in 2013, the "Urmia Lake Saving Working Group" and then the "Lake Restoration Headquarters" were formed in the government to restore Lake Urmia in a 10-year plan. The responsibility for the Lake Urmia Headquarters was also assigned to Issa Kalantari, who claimed in 2019 that "by 2021, we will witness the ecological restoration of Lake Urmia."

On this headquarters' website, one cannot find detailed information about the projects that have been completed and the process of saving the lake, but from its Telegram channel, one can learn that 15 trillion tomans have been spent to date without publishing a detailed report on the success of the projects and the details of the costs.

This process ultimately led to the dismissal of Issa Kalantari on July 19 of this year, while members of parliament also approved a request for an investigation into the performance of the Lake Urmia Restoration Committee. There is no report on the outcome of this request yet.

Issa Kalantari, the former head of Iran's Environmental Protection Organization, who was himself involved in the "Lake Urmia revival" process, warned on August 14 of this year that Lake Urmia must be revived at any cost, even at the cost of drying up the region's agriculture, because, according to him, "the drying up of Lake Urmia will have security consequences and no government can survive in the country."

Masoud Pezhakian, a representative from Tabriz, has also warned that if this trend continues, "more than 14 million people from Tabriz to near Tehran will be affected by salt dust."

The MP also acknowledged that "in addition to mismanagement and drought, factional and political behavior and interactions, and the failure to use capable people to revive the lake have added to its thirst."

Source: Radio Farda