Despite having a more advanced water management system than most Middle Eastern countries, similar to the other countries in the region, Iran is experiencing a serious water crisis. The government blames the current crisis on the changing climate, frequent droughts, and international sanctions, believing that water shortages are periodic. However, the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia. Iran has suffered from a symptom-based management paradigm, which mainly focuses on curing the problem symptoms rather than addressing the main causes. This paper reviews the current status of water resources in Iran and recognizes three major causes for the current water crisis: (1) rapid population growth and inappropriate spatial population distribution; (2) inefficient agriculture sector; and (3) mismanagement and thirst for development. The country is faced with serious challenges in the water sector, including but not limited to rising water demand and shortage, declining groundwater levels, deteriorating water quality, and increasing ecosystem losses. If immediate actions are not taken to address these issues, the situation could become more tragic in the near future. The paper suggests some crisis exit strategies that need to be immediately adopted to secure sustainable water resources, if Iran does not want to lose its international reputation for significant success in water resources management over thousands of years in an arid area of the world.

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Water management in Iran: what is causing the looming crisis?

Because of the significant impact on economic development, social stability, and ecological balance, the allocation of water resources has become an issue of worldwide concern. Therefore, the efficient, equitable, and sustainable allocation of water is vital for water management authorities. With sustainability (guaranteeing the minimum ecological water needs) as the constraint, the paper aims to enhance the water management by considering equity and efficiency. A multi-objective programming model is built with the first objective being to maximize the economic benefit efficiency to allow for the development of improved water allocation strategies and with the second objective being to maximize water allocation equity (measured using the Gini coefficient). A Compromise Programming (CP) method is employed to trade off economic benefit efficiency and equity in the water allocation, which can provide relatively flexible choices and trade-offs according to the decision makers’ preferences. The presented model is applied to the Qujiang river basin in China as a case study to demonstrate its feasibility, validity, and practicality, the results from which indicate the trade-off between equity and economic benefit efficiency in the model was feasible, and the conclusions are that river basin authorities need to take measures to decrease the rate of water loss and increase the available water to enhance water allocation efficiency and equity.

Optimal allocation of regional water resources: From a perspective of equity–efficiency tradeoff

A multi-objective optimization model with conditional value-at-risk constraints for water allocation equality

Raising water demands and insufficient freshwater resources are the main reasons of water conflicts in transboundary watersheds. Sustainable water allocation can be a resolution for water disputes as it addresses simultaneously economic, social and environmental benefits. In this paper, a multi-objective model is introduced, which leads to sustainable water allocation of transboundary watersheds taking into account all these three aspects. Five water allocation objectives are proposed for this model in which three of them address the social factors and others represent the economic and environmental preferences. The Compromise Programming technique is employed to solve the applied model to the Sefidrud Basin, Iran and several water allocation schemes are provided based on various weights combinations. The results of the model elucidate that the proposed model can allocate 83 percent of the Basin's water resources, to its stakeholders in a sustainable way while the environmental demand is satisfied. Sustainable water allocation requires the triple bottom line approach.Proposed multi-objective model covers economic, social, and environmental aspects.Our model focuses on water allocation of shared basins with competing stakeholders.We analysed the sensitivity of stakeholders to the objectives' weights.We applied the model to a real cases study to demonstrate its applicability.

Optimal water allocation through a multi-objective compromise between environmental, social, and economic preferences

Integrated modeling framework for evaluating and predicting the water resources carrying capacity in a continental river basin of Northwest China

A hybrid of Random Forest and Deep Auto-Encoder with support vector regression methods for accuracy improvement and uncertainty reduction of long-term streamflow prediction

The allocation of water to the stakeholders of a large basin involves conflicting objectives, since increasing the allocated water to one stakeholder leads to a reduction in water allocated to other stakeholders. The consideration of conflicting objectives is inevitable when the basin is a transboundary basin, where a river crosses at least one political border, either a border within a nation or an international boundary. This paper proposes a multi-objective optimization model for sharing water among stakeholders of a transboundary river, assuming that the stakeholders cooperate. Here, the cooperation implies a balanced water allocation to stakeholders since shortage in each stakeholder have negative impacts on others. Each objective function of the multi-objective model represents the water profit of a stakeholder; which has to be maximized. To reach a cooperative solution, a new method for transforming the multi-objective formulation to a three-step single objective formulation is proposed. The solution guarantees each stakeholder's profit which is larger than a percentage of its highest possible profit obtained in the case when the percentage of profit is equal for all stakeholders. The proposed model formulation was applied to the Sefidrud River where eight provinces are the stakeholders competing for water resources of this basin.

A Multi-objective Approach for Transboundary River Water Allocation

This paper describes an application of linear programming (LP) methods for optimal allocation of water among competing stakeholders that would achieve the highest economic return from water use in the agricultural section of the Sefidrud Basin, northern Iran. In a network presentation of the basin, the nodes stand for the supply and demand points and arcs represent reaches. The constraints of the LP model are the network structure of the basin (flows, stream geography and channel capacity), the available surface and ground water in each node, the environmental demand in different reaches, upper and lower bands of supply in each node and water balances. Optimal policies are derived for current and future demand. The optimal policies indicate that, at present, the basin water resources satisfy the demands of all stakeholders. Although, the results show that there is no conflict for supplying stakeholders’ current demands, they indicate that the current proportion of surface water used is not optimal compared with the proportion of ground water used. The results also indicate that some future demands of provinces with lower marginal value of water are unsatisfied and that this could cause conflict between stakeholders. Since in some nodes the optimal solutions suggest using surface water even where they have available ground water, they are categorized as having a higher possibility to construct dams in the basin.

Economic Sharing of Basin Water Resources between Competing Stakeholders

This paper proposes a mathematical model for allocating water to stakeholders of a shared watershed. Each stakeholder in the basin has a water demand and a water profit; however, the available water cannot meet the demands of all stakeholders. This shortage raises a conflict between stakeholders as they use a common resource. To reach an agreement between the stakeholders in water allocation, first a model was developed to obtain the highest possible profit that a stakeholder can achieve if the stakeholder is allowed to utilize as much as possible water after satisfying the basin environmental demands (flows). Then, another model was introduced which allocates water to each stakeholder such that the minimum ratio of stakeholders’ profits to their highest possible profits is maximized. It is shown that the obtained solution is non-dominated in terms of considering each stakeholder profit as an objective, which means that none of the objective functions can be improved in value without degrading some of the other objective values. The proposed method is applied to the Sefidrud River basin, which is one of the biggest rivers in Iran. The stakeholders of this basin are eight administrative provinces that compete for utilizing more water while the Basin’s water resources could not satisfy all stakeholders’ water requirements. The model’s results show that it can successfully be used for sustainable conflict resolution in a shared basin because the model satisfies the environmental water requirement in the entire basin and provides equitably the same ratio of the stakeholders’ highest possible profits for them. For the case of this study, the proposed approach allocates water to the stakeholders in such a way that they could obtain at least 65 % of their highest possible profits in average.

Reza Roozbahani

Papers

Optimal water allocation through a multi-objective compromise between environmental, social, and economic preferences

A hybrid of Random Forest and Deep Auto-Encoder with support vector regression methods for accuracy improvement and uncertainty reduction of long-term streamflow prediction

A Multi-objective Approach for Transboundary River Water Allocation

Economic Sharing of Basin Water Resources between Competing Stakeholders

Optimal allocation of water to competing stakeholders in a shared watershed