Water Resources Management of The Hirmand River Basin in Agricultural and Household Sectors

Abstract

Supply and demand management of Hirmand water resources is one of the most important problems faced by policymakers and they will not be able to manage this sector properly without specifying the future prospects of the Hirmand Area. The main objective of the research is to allocate water resources in the Hirmand Area by using dynamic optimization models in the agricultural and household sectors. The method of this research is based on the applied scientific method. The required statistics and information are obtained by the library method. In this research, the water demand functions in the agricultural and household sectors are achieved. The general objective function for determining the allocation is estimated by the EVIEWS and GAMS software packages. The results showed that for the agricultural sector, water demand is inversely related to water price, so that when the water price increases by 1%, the product will have a negative value decrease by 4.4%. Moreover, since in this model, the demand function for water is only a function of the price, the return to the scale is decreasing and the Isoquant Curve in the agricultural sector has a negative technical substitution rate in all aquatic conditions. In household demand, the results showed that with the increase in water price, consumption decreases and that the rise in price is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for reducing consumption. The average consumption based on the current trend is 12.42 m3 per month for each household. The reaction in the amount of demand change versus the change in the number of stormy days is positive and equal to 0.39.