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Abstract
The rapid shrinkage of Lake Urmia, one of the world’s largest saline lakes located in northwestern Iran, is a tragic wake-up call to revisit the principles of water resources management based on the socio-economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. The overarching goal of this paper is to set a framework for deriving dynamic, climate-informed environmental inflows for drying lakes considering both meteorological/climatic and anthropogenic conditions. We report on the compounding effects of meteorological drought and unsustainable water resource management that contributed to Lake Urmia’s contemporary environmental catastrophe. Using rich datasets of hydrologic attributes, water demands and withdrawals, as well as water management infrastructure (i.e. reservoir capacity and operating policies), we provide a quantitative assessment of the basin’s water resources, demonstrating that Lake Urmia reached a tipping point in the early 2000s. The lake level failed to rebound to its designated ecological threshold (1274 m above sea level) during a relatively normal hydro-period immediately after the drought of record (1998–2002). The collapse was caused by a marked overshoot of the basin’s hydrologic capacity due to growing anthropogenic drought in the face of extreme climatological stressors. We offer a dynamic environmental inflow plan for different climate conditions (dry, wet and near normal), combined with three representative water withdrawal scenarios. Assuming effective implementation of the proposed 40% reduction in the current water withdrawals, the required environmental inflows range from 2900 million cubic meters per year (mcm yr−1) during dry conditions to 5400 mcm yr−1 during wet periods with the average being 4100 mcm yr−1. Finally, for different environmental inflow scenarios, we estimate the expected recovery time for re-establishing the ecological level of Lake Urmia.
Highlights
The chance of preserving lakes will be higher if human activities are the chief reason for the water level decline because of opportunities for taking real actions to improve water management in the lake basin
We develop an understanding of lake level changes using comprehensive datasets of water resources management infrastructure, observed streamflow data, and agricultural and urban water demand data from 117 sub-basins
In an extremely dry period, in which the annual runoff reduces by 48%, the lake is gravely vulnerable to increases in anthropogenic water demands, elevating the water stress index (WSI) to a distressing level of 90%
Summary
Global fresh water resources are under growing pressure due to over-allocation of surface water (Vorosmarty et al 2000, Hoekstra et al 2012) and groundwater resources (Wada et al 2010, Gleeson et al 2012, Ashraf et al 2017). Prime examples of drying terminal lakes in endorheic basins include the Aral Sea in Central Asia (Micklin 1988), Walker Lake and Great Salt Lake in the US (Wurtsbaugh et al 2017), Lake Chad in Africa (Gao et al 2011), and Lake Urmia in northwestern Iran (AghaKouchak et al 2015). These alarming cases of lake level decline as well as other less dramatic incidents have been subjects of climate change scenario and impact assessments around the world (e.g. Coe and Foley 2001, Schwartz et al 2004, Ma et al 2010, Mohammed and Tarboton 2012, Shadkam et al 2016). The chance of preserving lakes will be higher if human activities are the chief reason for the water level decline because of opportunities for taking real actions to improve water management in the lake basin
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