The Lake Urmia Disaster That Should Never Have Happened

A critical examination of the narratives explaining the desiccation of Lake Urmia (1995–2023) is presented in this paper, which challenges conventional accounts that attribute the disaster primarily to climate change, drought, or other multiple causes. Despite extensive research reinforcing this view, an alternative explanation is emerging by focusing on encroachments into the hydrological cycle of the basin. Although the impacts in the basin have evolved through degradation, stress, crisis, and disaster, the role of encroachment by 44 dams has not been a direct subject of discourse. To this end, the paper takes two approaches. 1. Encroachment-Focused Explanation: Given the scale of dam encroachment in the basin, the burden of proof now lies with each research study to explicitly discard the role of these encroachments in the disaster. The paper argues that if a research study does not account for encroachments, it is within the reductive framework, and this is the case for most of the past scientific studies. Even if the underlying assumptions are unclear or implicitly aligned with sustainable development and good governance, the approach is still considered reductive. 2. Exploring Undertones in Lake Urmia Discourse (EU-LUD): The paper initiates an architecture to produce quantitative results that explore undertones in the published literature, using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) as a calibration tool, but not as the lead interpreter. The paper shows that the published results are at risk of significant bias from unscientific narratives, potentially harmful to at-risk populations and to the environmental system, by overlooking the role of dam encroachments. Reductive models ought not to contribute to the formation of any discourse or decision-making, least of all the discourse on Lake Urmia.