Killer Smog Tests Top Iran Woman as Pollution Sparks Action

(Bloomberg) -- The snowy peaks of the Alborz Mountains visible through Iranian Vice-President Masoumeh Ebtekar’s Tehran office window may be evidence that the city is finally serious about tackling its chronic air pollution.

The capital’s factories and five million vehicles, prevented from burning imported cleaner fuels by global sanctions, turn the air in colder months into a suffocating smog that shuts schools and offices. Officials blame the toxins for the premature deaths of 4,000 residents a year. Many more among Tehran’s 12 million people choke behind surgical masks, as roadside pollution readings ram home the health threat.

For Ebtekar, who heads the country’s Environment Protection Organization and is the most influential woman in the administration of President Hassan Rouhani, cleaning up the mess can’t be put off. As a start, she says, the sale of locally produced low-quality gasoline has been stopped, while higher standards and stricter inspections have been imposed at car production plants.

“Air pollution adversely affects 35 million” Iranians or half the country’s inhabitants, she said in an interview. Even after “tangible results, there’s still a long way to go,” said Ebtekar, who first gained prominence as a spokeswoman for the students who stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held American hostages for more than a year.

Still, “We have fewer days where the pollution levels are high,” she said, as a wind helped reveal the mountains that surround Tehran but which are often obscured by thick haze.
Looming Crisis

Air quality has improved, says Vahid Hosseini, who heads Tehran’s Air Quality Control Co., affiliated to the city’s municipal administration. The number of heavily “polluted days” fell in the 10 months since April compared with the same period in the two previous years, he said Feb. 22 in a report on the organization’s website.

Tehran’s geography, though, poses an additional challenge to officials fighting pollution. The city sits in a basin at an altitude above 1,100 meters, trapping the foul air.

A tenfold increase in the city’s population in 75 years, decades of resource mismanagement, and the technological isolation enforced by sanctions are fueling an environmental crisis in Tehran and across Iran. While an accord with world powers over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program may end its pariah status, repairing the environment will require more accountable politics and the dismantling of policies that allowed for a surge in the use of fuel and water, analysts say.

Subsidies “have certainly exacerbated problems because you’re essentially stimulating overuse of resources,” Toby Iles, a senior Middle East analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, said in a phone interview from Singapore. “Iran clearly needs to” change course, he said.
Tightened Sanctions

In the northwest, irrigation projects have depleted groundwater sources, prompting officials to warn of supply cuts to the largest consumers in Tehran. Some of the country’s largest lakes have shrunk as dams were built and farmers diverted water for crops. Dust blowing from dessicated water bodies adds to air pollution.

Iran is located in a “belt of drought and dryness, which has been intensified due to climate change,” Ebtekar said. The country faces “very difficult environmental circumstances,” she said.

“We’re looking for a revolution” in water consumption patterns, Ebtekar said.

Air pollution worsened in 2010 after the U.S. tightened sanctions imposed on Iran over its nuclear work.

The restrictions prevented global companies from selling refined oil products to Iran, at the time reliant on imports for as much as a third of its gasoline consumption. In response, Iran started producing low-quality fuel at its petrochemical complexes.
Metro Trip

Ahvaz, the capital of Iran’s southwestern oil-producing Khuzestan province, was ranked the most polluted city in the world based on data for so-called PM10 particulates that was released by the World Health Organization in 2011.

In January, sandstorms exacerbated the problem, canceling flights and forcing people indoors. Residents began a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #Khuzestancantbreath, posting photos of the yellow air shrouding the city.

“The ground dried up and the sky became dirty,” one local wrote in a December article in the Tehran-based weekly Tejarat-e-Farda. Lawmakers representing Khuzestan donned face masks in a protest inside parliament.

There are signs top officials are aware of the need for action. In January, Rouhani, his foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and other officials promoted the annual clean air day by traveling in Tehran’s metro.
Phased Out

By lowering some subsidies, authorities have already reduced fuel consumption, while Iran may have been able to source higher-grade gasoline from Asian nations, according to recent reports.

The sale of the heavily polluting cheap gasoline “has been totally phased out, the levels of benzene and other aromatic compounds in ambient air have decreased,” Ebtekar said in the interview, speaking in English.

That has removed “poisonous and carcinogenic” particles from the atmosphere, Jalaledin Shayegan Salek, a professor at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, wrote Jan. 11. Authorities may need to consider tougher measures such as limiting the number of cars in circulation and removing obsolete vehicles from the roads, he said.

Rouhani’s government has put environmental issues “very high on its agenda” and has achieved “a lot of momentum,” Ebtekar said. “But the more we move ahead, the more we see how much we had fallen behind.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Ladane Nasseri in Tehran at [email protected]

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alaa Shahine at [email protected] Mark Williams