Abstract
In terms of having a comprehensive vision toward supplying the water requirements, a multi-criteria decision-making approach was employed on the Zarrine River Basin (ZRB) in the northwest of Iran. First, the climate change impacts were analyzed with the Long Ashton Research Station Weather Generator (LARS-WG) downscaling approach by using General Circulation Models (GCMs) including the European Consortium Earth System Model (EC-EARTH), Hadley Centre Global Environment Model version 2 (HADGEM2), Model for Interdisciplinary Research on Climate, version 5 (MIROC5), and Max Planck Institute Earth System Model (MPI-ESM), from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5) under Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP4.5, RCP8.5) scenarios for 2021–2080. Afterward, the downscaled variables were utilized as inputs to the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model to predict future runoff under the climate change impact. Finally, the system dynamics (SD) model was employed to simulate various scenarios for assessing water balance utilizing the Vensim software. The results of downscaling models suggested that the temperature of the basin will increase by 0.47 and 0.91 °C under RCPs4.5 and 8.5 by 2040, respectively. Additionally, the precipitation will decrease by 3.5 percent under RCP4.5 and 14 percent under RCP8.5, respectively. Moreover, simulation results revealed that the water demand in various sectors will be enormously increased. The contribution of the climate change impact on the future run-off was a seven percent decrease, on average, over the basin. The SD model, according to presented plausible scenarios including decreasing agriculture product and shifting irrigation efficiency, cloud-seeding, population control, and household consumption reduction, reducing meat and animal-husbandry production, and groundwater consumption control, resulted in a water balance equilibrium over five years. However, the performance of individual scenarios was not effective; instead, a combination of several scenarios led to effective performance in managing reduced runoff under climate change.
Highlights
Integrated water resource management (IWRM) constitutes one of the most substantial and inevitable challenges in urban planning
11 demonstrate that underreducing the pessimistic consumption, and groundwater withdrawing would be beneficial for restoring the scenario of RCP8.5, a drastic decrease was observed in the water balance of the basin; water level.based
10, andwhich to maintain considered a negative of climate change in the basin, is equalequilibrium to a 7% rebetween local supply and demand and to preserve it, a cooperative spirit is vital among all duction in water supply of Zarrine River Basin (ZRB)
Summary
Integrated water resource management (IWRM) constitutes one of the most substantial and inevitable challenges in urban planning. Beyond its problematic nature, finding a beneficial equilibrium between human and anthropogenic impacts on the environment has always been the target of sustainable environmental management [1]. One of the irreparable damages of human beings to nature is global warming and the climate change. The most prominent concern of IWRM under climate change impact is achieving the sustainable development goals on watersheds and basins. To assess the impacts of climate change on water resources, general circulation models (GCMs) are widely used [2]. Since GCM data could not be utilized for the impact studies of climate change directly, downscaling techniques were developed to convert the coarse resolution data of the GCMs into local scale-specific resolutions.
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