The rain that lashed Tehran during this year’s war has triggered a deluge of social media posts attacking Kaveh Madani, a scientist in exile and formerly Iran’s chief environmental diplomat.
It is good news that some of the country’s reservoirs and lakes have started to fill up again after years of painful droughts. But the rain has also given new life to an old conspiracy theory that Madani and the west were responsible for those droughts, he explains at the start of our lunch in the peaceful courtyard of a Venice restaurant.
The man branded a “water terrorist” and a “spy” by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) now heads up the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Canada, and later this summer will be presented with the world’s top prize for water management, informally known as the Nobel for Water.