Iran’s Lake Orumieh to get extra water

The Iranian government seeks to invigorate Lake Orumieh via plans to add some two billion cubic meters of water to the shrinking lake, a report says.

“With the order of the Iranian President [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad], two billion cubic meters of water will be added to the lake between five and ten years,” Mehr news agency reported head of Iran’s Department of the Environment, Mohammad-Javad Mohammadizadeh, as saying on Wednesday.

Half of the additional “water will be contributed by preserving the regional aquifers and the rest would be provided through other aquatic sources and cloud seeding,” the Iranian vice-president for Environmental Protection added.

The official, however, pointed out that the world’s second largest salt water lake in northeast Iran would need at least 3.1 billion cubic meters of extra water to survive.

Recently, Lake Orumieh turned red, leading experts to blame global warming for the rare phenomenon.

Experts have warned that ecological factors, together with human activity, will eventually cause the lake to dry up.

Declining rainfall and rising temperatures, coupled by ecological changes that threaten the life of the aquatic species in the lake’s ecosystem, have compounded its issues.

Lake Orumieh has been registered by UNESCO as a Biosphere Reserve; it is listed as a wetland of international importance under the 1971 Ramsar Convention.