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.

/pdf/water-management-in-iran-what-is-causing-the-looming-crisis-4fbm5zwqwu.pdf

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

Decision and Value Theory.

A system of systems approach to energy sustainability assessment: Are all renewables really green?

[1] Many large-scale water resources systems, especially in transboundary contexts, are characterized by the presence of several and conflicting interests and managed by multiple, institutionally independent decision makers. These systems are often studied adopting a centralized approach based on the assumption of full cooperation and information exchange among the involved parties. Such a perspective is conceptually interesting to quantify the best achievable performance but might have little practical impact given the real political and institutional setting. In this work, we propose a novel decision-analytic framework based on multiagent systems to model and analyze different levels of cooperation and information exchange among multiple decision makers. The Zambezi River basin is used as a case study. According to the proposed agent-based optimization approach, each agent represents a decision maker, whose decisions are defined by an explicit optimization problem considering only the agent's local interests. The economic value of information exchange is estimated comparing a noncooperative setting, where agents act independently, with the first basic level of cooperation, i.e., coordination, characterized by full information exchange. The economic value of cooperation is also estimated by comparison with the ideal, fully cooperative management of the system. Results show that coordination, obtained with complete information exchange, allows the downstream agents to better adapt to the upstream behaviors. The impact of information exchange depends on the objective considered, and we show coordination to be particularly beneficial to environmental interests.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/wrcr.20287

Assessing the value of cooperation and information exchange in large water resources systems by agent‐based optimization

Multi-objective decision-making for green infrastructure planning (LID-BMPs) in urban storm water management under uncertainty

This paper evaluates the proposed alternatives for sharing the Caspian Sea from the social planner’s or systems-level perspective with respect to the stakeholders’ utilities from the oil and natural gas resources of the sea. Different multi-criteria decision-making methods, namely dominance, maximin, lexicography, simple additive weighting, and TOPSIS are applied to determine the social planner’s ranking of these alternatives. Results suggest the Condominium governance regime as the most promising division method. Bankruptcy rules and cooperative game theory methods can be considered as the other socially optimal resolutions to the conflict over sharing the Caspian Sea energy resources among its five littoral countries. Consideration of these methods in negotiations may help with resolving the existing deadlock, which has been in place for two decades.

Social Planner’s Solution for the Caspian Sea Conflict

The objective of this study is to identify the best legal regime for governing the Caspian Sea, considering the interests of the involved parties. Since 1993, negotiations have been going on among five littoral states of the Caspian Sea: Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan over how to share the resources of the Caspian Sea. Six different Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods are applied here to identify the best legal regime to govern the sea out of the proposed options by the negotiating parties. Results suggest the Condominium regime, applied to both the sea surface and the seabed as the best option for governing the Caspian Sea. Due to limitations of the study in considering the economic, military, and political powers of the negotiation parties in determining the best option, further studies are required to verify the results obtained in this paper.

Finding the best legal governance regime for the Caspian Sea through Multi-Criteria Decision-Making methods

Greenhouse gas emissions, resulting from burning non-renewable energy sources, are recognized as the major cause of global warming. Hence, reducing carbon footprint of energy uses through replacing non-renewable energy sources with renewable ones is believed to be an efficient method for combating climate warming. However, not all renewable energy sources may be appropriate as while they can reduce carbon emissions efficiently, they may be inefficient when it comes to other criteria such as water footprint. For instance, some bio-fuels may consume up to 400 times more water than conventional non-renewable energy sources, which in turn can increase the energy uses of the water sector, resulting in an increased indirect greenhouse gas emissions in long run. This paper discusses that carbon footprint should not be considered as the sole criterion for selecting energy sources. By simultaneous consideration of three different criteria (1- carbon footprint, 2- water footprint, and 3- economic cost), this paper determines the overall efficiency of different non-renewable and renewable energy sources to show how the ranking of energy sources changes when carbon footprint is not considered as the sole criterion for determining efficiency of energy sources for climate change mitigation.

Can We Rely on Renewable Energy Sources to Overcome Global Warming

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Social Planner’s Solution for the Caspian Sea Conflict

Finding the best legal governance regime for the Caspian Sea through Multi-Criteria Decision-Making methods

Can We Rely on Renewable Energy Sources to Overcome Global Warming