A Hybrid Hydro-Economic Framework to Allocate Water over the Basin Scale Region under the Water Shortage Periods

Dake Xu

doi:10.6180/jase.202401_27(1).0001

A Hybrid Hydro-Economic Framework to Allocate Water over the Basin Scale Region under the Water Shortage Periods

Civil Engineering

Dake XuThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

China Urban Construction Design and Research Institute, Beijing, 100120, China

Received: May 17, 2022
Accepted: February 9, 2023
Publication Date: May 2, 2023

Copyright The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.

Download Citation: ||https://doi.org/10.6180/jase.202401_27(1).0001

The present study proposed a hydro-economic framework for water allocation within the Zayande-Rud basin located in Iran, including urban, industry, agriculture, and environmental sectors as water users. The developed framework can investigate the environmental, economic, and social impacts of the economic-oriented water allocation as well as distributions using respective indices. The hydrologic simulation results indicated that the water scarcity dedicated to different sectors, mostly affected the environment by a 45% water deficit, while residential plus industry sections had a 31% and 29% water shortage, respectively. The application of the hydro-economic model (HEM) for water allocation under the water shortage scenario led to a 9.6%, 4%, and 6% increase in the irrigated area (47467 ha), farmers’ profit (equal to 9.7 million USD), and the employment rate in comparison with the base conditions, respectively. By utilizing the proposed hydro-economic model, the simulation results revealed that the irrigated area can be increased as much as 14%, a further 6% increase in profits for farmers (about 12.7 million USD), and enhancing the employment rate up to10.6%. Moreover, water consumption in agriculture sector can be reduced by 15% compared with traditional water allocation method. Accordingly, using such an integrated water distribution model in a basin with different kinds of water users could give policy-makers an actual view of integrated water management while conducting such plans requires testing in real conditions to analyze the hidden problems as barriers.

Keywords: Hydro-economy, Positive mathematical programming, Water allocation, Zayande-Rud Basin, Socio-economic

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