Ali Sardar Shahraki; Mahmood Mohhamad Ghasemi
Abstract
The issue of water resource management has become extremely complicated due to the droughts of the last two decades and the competition among the drinking sector, agricultural sector, and international Hamoun wetland to use water. To analyze the status and help managers in policy analysis and decision-making, ...
Read More
The issue of water resource management has become extremely complicated due to the droughts of the last two decades and the competition among the drinking sector, agricultural sector, and international Hamoun wetland to use water. To analyze the status and help managers in policy analysis and decision-making, this research adopted an integrated water resource model (WEAP) with a decision support system (DSS) approach to study the effect of drought on rural and agricultural development and its economic impacts in the region. So, the Iranian government’s water development projects were simulated within 11 scenarios for a medium-term period (up to the 2030 horizon) and the implications of their implementation for the development of the rural and agricultural sectors were assessed. According to the results, if Afghanistan observes Iran’s water rights, there will still be a great amount of unmet water demand (314.53 million m3) for the agricultural and wetland sectors. However, if this scenario is realized, the unmet demand will decrease by about 196 million m3 versus the status quo and the agricultural sector’s profit will increase by about 314 billion IRR, which will be very helpful for rural development. So, relevant officials should put their best effort into realizing the water right. It is suggested to strengthen water diplomacy between the two main stakeholders in the region in order to reduce the persistence of drought.
Farzaneh Shahbakhsh; Mahdi Safdari; Ali Sardar Shahraki
Abstract
Water is the basis of life, the foundation of nature, and the pillar of social, economic, and cultural development of societies. So, the supply of safe and consumable water has always been a concern. On the other hand, a major challenge of modern societies is the lack of precipitation and frequent droughts. ...
Read More
Water is the basis of life, the foundation of nature, and the pillar of social, economic, and cultural development of societies. So, the supply of safe and consumable water has always been a concern. On the other hand, a major challenge of modern societies is the lack of precipitation and frequent droughts. Thus, the present paper assesses the principles of water governance in the Sistan region with respect to the development of water exploitation systems with an environmental approach and presents an integrated multi-attribute decision-making model with a water governance approach in the Sistan region. The simple additive weighting (SAW) method that is used here is one of the multiple attribute decision making (MADM) methods. The indicators of water governance principles were derived from the opinions of 30 water experts, faculty members, and water users in the Sistan region by the SAW method, and weights were assigned to them to form MADM matrices. According to the results, six indicators were derived as the indicators determining the principles of water governance. ‘Traditional users’ was selected as the strongest system and ‘irrigation and drainage networks exploitation companies’ as the weakest system. Also, according to the results of water experts, the first rank was assigned to ‘irrigation and drainage networks exploitation companies’ (A2) with the final crisp score of 6.818 followed by ‘water user cooperatives’ (A4) with the final crisp score of 6.515 in the second rank and ‘private firms’ (A6) with the final crisp score of 6.308 in the third rank.
