Izmir Is Running Out of Water. Here's What's Actually Keeping the Taps On.

In December I traveled to İzmir, Turkey to visit my wife's family. If you haven't been, it's a beautiful city that wraps around a bay on the Aegean Sea. Sunsets along the waterfront can feel unreal, with the sun dropping behind a handful of Greek islands in the distance.

İzmir is built around water, but like many cities across the Mediterranean, the past decade has brought hotter temperatures and less reliable rainfall. That's left this city of roughly 5 million people in a years-long drought, searching for water wherever it can find it.

Traditionally, the water system in İzmir — and across much of Turkey — works on a catchment system. Winter snows and spring rains are captured in large reservoirs and stored to get a dry city through the summer.

But with less rain, the past few years have pushed reservoirs across the region to critically low levels. When I visited at the end of 2025, four of six reservoirs were under 5%. The Tahtalı Dam, which supplies around half of İzmir's water, was below 1% — effectively empty. To conserve what's left, the city implemented rolling water cuts.

And yet, day to day, life seemed to be ticking along. The shower at home ran when I needed it. Businesses I spoke with said they hadn't noticed their water reduced.

That felt strange, so I followed my curiosity. After talking with a handful of water-resources experts, both Turkish and American, I found the answer: groundwater.

Izmir — and countless other cities like it around the world — are filling the gap with precious underground reserves, pumping water from aquifers deep below the surface at rates far faster than they can be replenished. I asked hydrologist John Selker of Oregon State University to put the math in plain terms: "In a place dry as Turkey, the amount of net water coming to replenish the aquifers is of the order of an inch a year. Whereas you can easily draw out many, many feet of water a year."

The real leverage isn't in shorter showers. The big decisions are upstream — in agriculture and industry. In Turkey, as in much of the American West, roughly 90% of groundwater goes to irrigation. And in coastal cities like İzmir, the risks go further still — saltwater intrusion, displaced farmers, a city quietly installing backup water tanks for the first time.

For all of that, listen to or read my full piece at The World from PRX/WGBH Boston.

Ben Derico is a San Francisco-based science and climate journalist. His work has appeared in The World from PRX, The Guardian, and The Intercept.