A man and a boy stand beside a fishing boat stranded on dry land where the Hamoun wetland used to be.

Research · Education · Accountability

People.Planet.Accountability.

When rivers run dry and wetlands disappear, people do not simply “migrate” — they are displaced. HERA uses evidence to ask why, and who should answer for it.

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Hamoun wetlands, Sistan · Photo: Solmaz Daryani, CC BY-SA 4.0

When the land fails, people move. We ask why.

HERA was founded in Canada in October 2026 to study and explain one of the defining links of our time: the relationship between environmental conditions and human displacement — and the human rights and accountability questions that sit between them.

Why HERA

The scale of the crisis, in numbers

0million

internal displacements triggered by disasters in 2024 — the highest ever recorded.

Source: IDMC, Global Report on Internal Displacement 2025

up to0%

of the world’s land is already degraded, putting half of global GDP at risk.

Source: UNCCD, Global Land Outlook 2 (2022)

0million

people could be forced to move within their own countries by 2050 because of climate change.

Source: World Bank, Groundswell Part 2 (2021)

about0%

of Lake Urmia’s surface area was lost in the two decades after its 1995 high-water mark.

Source: NASA Earth Observatory (2023)

Before and after

Three years. One lake.

Drag the handle to see Lake Urmia, in north-western Iran, in September 2020 and in September 2023. Wet years in 2018–2019 briefly refilled the lake; by autumn 2023 it had nearly dried out again.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Satellite image of Lake Urmia in September 2020, with green-blue water filling most of the basin.

Satellite image of Lake Urmia in September 2023, almost entirely white salt flat.

Sept 2020 Sept 2023

Four pillars

Our name is our map

Each letter of HERA is one of the areas we work on.

Human

Human rights, dignity and the testimony of displaced people. They own their stories — they are not just subjects of research.

Environment

Data and research on the degradation of water, soil, air and wetlands, and on the impacts of a changing climate.

Resilience

Knowledge and education for communities living through crisis — and for the future that can still be built.

Accountability

Following the evidence to the decisions behind environmental harm, and naming who is responsible — with proof.

First research focus

Where the land is breaking

HERA’s mandate is global. Our first research programme begins in Iran and the wider region — where environmental collapse and the absence of accountability reinforce each other.

A white crust of salt stretches to a rocky island on the dried bed of Lake Urmia.

~90% of area lost since 1995

North-west Iran

Lake Urmia

Once one of the largest saltwater lakes on Earth. Reduced rainfall and water extraction for farming have turned much of it into salt flat.

Satellite view of the Hamoun basin: pale dry lakebeds with only small patches of blue water.

Home of the “120-day wind”

Sistan, Iran–Afghanistan border

Hamoun wetlands

Fed mainly by the Helmand River, the Hamoun lakes have dried out repeatedly since the severe drought at the end of the 1990s.

Aerial view of a salt-crusted, cracked wetland bed with a small remaining pool of water.

A Ramsar-listed wetland

Isfahan

Zayandeh Rud & Gavkhouni

Isfahan’s river has run dry through the city for long periods, and the Gavkhouni wetland at its end — a wetland of international importance — has largely dried.