Iran made an all-out effort last week to combat a severe drought by seeding the clouds with chemicals to produce rain. The technique appears to have worked all too well, as heavy rainfall caused flooding in portions of western Iran on Monday.

Iran grapples with chronic water shortages in the best of years, but the past six years have been among the worst, with chronic drought conditions so severe that partially evacuating the capital city of Tehran was on the table.

Writing at Forbes on Sunday, environmental scientist Kaveh Madani of the U.N. University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health — whose research has been focused on Iran’s “water bankruptcy” — argued that poor water management by the Iranian country has greatly exacerbated the problem:

For decades, Iranian

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