Multi-dimensional management framework on fresh groundwater lens of Kish Island in the Persian Gulf, Iran

Abstract

Groundwater in arid and semi-arid coastal aquifers is vulnerable to seawater intrusion and quality deterioration despite being one of the most reliable sources of water supply due to the increasing number of development plans and competition between water consumers. A multi-dimensional groundwater management framework is developed to trade-off between groundwater abstraction, allocation equity, groundwater quality, and energy considerations in the reverse osmosis (RO) filtration process in the fresh groundwater lens of Kish Island, Iran. An arid island confined in the Persian Gulf is modeled using 3D simulation and three well-occupied multi-objective evolutionary optimization algorithms. Four objectives include: maximizing the groundwater abstraction, minimizing the Gini coefficient (allocation inequity), minimizing the total energy required to pass saline water through the RO membrane to reach the standard total dissolved solids (TDS), and minimizing the average TDS concentration of water abstraction positions from 11 management zones have been considered over a 50-year management horizon. Solutions obtained in the simulation-based constrained multi-objective optimization framework allow managers to choose from 587 Pareto optimal solutions. They provide an abstraction scheme with a range of 1.44 to 4.53 MCM/yr, a Gini coefficient of 0 to 0.98, filtration energy of 988,562 to 1,935,760 kWh/yr, and an average TDS of 19,663 to 21,351 mg/L. The Pareto optimal solutions can help decision-makers decide on the multi-dimensional problems of sustainable coastal groundwater management and show patterns among different objectives.