‘They called me a water terrorist’: exiled Iranian scientist wins global prize

Prof Kaveh Madani, winner of the Stockholm water prize, was accused of sabotage with his environmental work

Eight years before he got the call telling him he had won the Stockholm water prize, Prof Kaveh Madani was being interrogated by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, accused of being a spy for the CIA, MI6 or the Mossad.

Today he is in exile and on Wednesday won the world’s most prestigious water prize for combining “groundbreaking research on water management with policy, diplomacy and global outreach, often under personal risk and political complexity”.

The Iranian scientist says he is “encouraged and humbled” by the award, though the moment is bittersweet.

“The sad part is that I don’t know if my compatriots [in Iran] will be celebrating it with me,” he says. “The people who supported me and didn’t give up on me. I don’t even know if they will hear about this because they’re disconnected at the moment.”

Madani’s relationship with danger began early. He was six years old when an Iraqi missile struck near his home in Tehran. He was watching television when it hit.

“I remember the presenter saying, ‘Dear children …’ and then there was an explosion. Everything went dark.” He describes a four-storey building rising into the air. His mother was bleeding. People were screaming. Decades on, it has not left him. “One of my worst nightmares is still planes attacking and explosions outside our apartment.”

He studied civil engineering in Tabriz, then left Iran on an Iranian passport which, he notes, severely limits your options. He ended up in Sweden. “The Swedes were kind to me. Someone at immigration said: ‘OK, this guy is not a terrorist,’ and gave me a visa. That shaped my whole life.”

A PhD at University of California, Davis, followed, then a position at Imperial College London, where he built an international reputation modelling water systems.

Early in his career he began applying game theory to water management, arguing that conventional models failed because they assumed people would cooperate. His research kept returning to one conclusion: water crises in Iran and other countries were not simply a product of climate breakdown, they were the result of mismanagement.

“Some people said I was ignoring climate change, others said I was blaming the Islamic Republic. But gradually the narrative started to change.” The concept he became known for – water bankruptcy – grew out of his objection to the word “crisis”, which implies a temporary shock, a deviation from normal that can be corrected, when many aquifers and rivers are drained beyond the point of return.

Then, in 2017, while still in London, the Iranian government invited him home, offering him a cabinet-level position as deputy head of the environment department. It was an extraordinary moment: a diaspora scientist being asked to return to help the country with its environmental problems.

He said yes but he “didn’t want to end up in jail – that was my only condition for the job”.

Madani knew the risks but was hopeful. “What if this was a chance for my generation? For the kids who have left Iran and the children of the revolution who think differently?”

He was arrested at passport control in Tehran and interrogated. The Revolutionary Guards took his computers and his phone. In Iran, the elected government and the Revolutionary Guards exist as parallel power structures. “No one, not even the government, could locate me,” he says.

“It was a very bumpy start. But I told myself: I came here to bring hope. Losing hope was the last thing I wanted because it would send a message to the rest of the world, to Iranians.”

He kept going. Madani’s time in government was brief but he pushed for reforms from the inside, appointing women to senior positions and taking the water mismanagement narrative directly to the cabinet.

But the accusations escalated fast. Hardliners declared he had been planted by western intelligence agencies. His work on water scarcity was reframed as sabotage.

“Some said I was trying to destroy Iranian agriculture, reduce production so the country would rely on imported food,” he says. The charges kept coming. “They called me an infiltrator, a ‘water terrorist’ and even a ‘bioterrorist’,” with some claiming he wanted to weaken Iran by pushing reliance on genetically modified food. “You read it and you laugh. But after repeated interrogations you realise they are serious.”

His work in game theory, he says, helped him survive the interrogations. “You have to put yourself in their shoes. Why are they having these concerns?” Understanding the logic of his accusers was the only way to navigate it.

In 2018 the Revolutionary Guards intensified a crackdown on environmental experts. Madani was arrested and interrogated multiple times. Several conservationists were jailed. One of them, the Iranian-Canadian professor Kavous Seyed-Emami, died in custody under disputed circumstances.

Madani fled the country and went into hiding. Eventually he resurfaced in the US, taking up an academic role at Yale before moving into international work. Today he leads the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, often described as the UN’s thinktank on water.

Before war broke out across the Middle East, Tehran was perilously close to running out of water, a situation known as day zero. But Madani is quick to point out that this is not uniquely an Iranian problem.

Cape Town, Chennai and São Paulo have all faced their own day zeros. Water is vanishing from Lake Urmia in Iran, but also from the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan, the Dead Sea in Israel, and the Great Salt Lake in the US. “It’s everywhere,” he says.

He is equally impatient with the idea that political change alone could fix it. “There is this belief that Iran would become Switzerland overnight if the Islamic Republic disappeared, but if day zero arrives and the reservoirs are empty, it doesn’t matter who is in power. There is no water to pump, there is no water to allocate.”

And now the war has buried the conversation entirely. “More than 3 million people have been displaced. If there is no peace, no one gives a damn about the environment. People don’t have the chance to care.”

The damage will outlast the fighting. Strikes on oil facilities during rainfall mean chemicals fall back to earth as acid rain, settling into soil and water for years.

As a UN official he must remain diplomatic and impartial, even when events in Iran weigh heavily on him. “I feel like I’m working with a map of the world in which Iran would be dark because anything I say about it is politicised.”

He added: “People who supported me ask me why I’m not speaking out more. But when you are an international civil servant, your heart is there, yet you still have to follow the protocols.”

In his acceptance statement he wrote that water does not wait for politics. “Water bankruptcy is a common threat that transcends every military line. We must recognise our shared vulnerability if we are ever to find our shared peace.”