Futuristic research of resilience of water resources with scenario planning approach based on case study: Zayandeh Rood watershed

Introduction

The rapid growth of the population, the development of economic activities, and human needs for natural resources, including water resources, have caused an imbalance between supply and demand, and have ultimately caused the instability and lack of resilience of these resources in most regions of the world, especially arid and semi-arid regions such as our countries. Water is the foundation of life, the foundation of nature, and the axis of economic, social, and cultural development of societies. Providing safe and sufficient water has always been one of the most important challenges of the world community in the third millennium, especially in the arid belt countries of the world and the West Asian region. The United Nations World Water Development Report (2020) shows that global water consumption has increased six-fold over the past century and continues to grow by approximately 1% annually. Therefore, an increasing share of the population will face water shortage. Achieving sustainable development of water resources is widely linked to the concept of resilience.

In this research, an attempt has been made to address the various dimensions and indicators of resilience, which include social, economic, and environmental resilience, and which play an effective role in the resilience of water resources. Then we will focus on the resilience of water resources and the emergence of imaginable possibilities in case of occurrence in each scenario to prioritize environmental, economic, and social changes by considering different conditions to create a clear understanding of the change of each variable for researchers. The present study tries to apply the basic scenario planning approach with Futurology for future research by dealing with one of Iran's important central catchment areas, which is also facing various challenges.

Materials and Methods

The current research, with a future research approach, identifies the most important factors affecting the resilience of water resources in the Zayandeh Rood watershed. In this research, due to its exploratory nature, the environmental scanning technique was used, and due to the dominant approach of this research, which is future research, the Delphi technique was used. Because due to its specialized nature, this research cannot be done through conventional methods of surveying people. The Delphi method is a method that relies on wisdom, collective intelligence, and brainstorming to reach the consensus of experts on a specific topic so that the most appropriate answers can be obtained. The sample population of this research is a group of 50 experts, people active in the field of water, experts, who are experts in two fields: "future research approach" and "resilience of water resources". At the final stage, because the coefficient of agreement between the panel members regarding the questions of the questionnaire has increased significantly compared to the first round, the continuation of Delphi has been omitted and at this stage, the number of 33 factors has been called as the final index for structural analysis. The vision of questions and issues is designed for the next 25 years. At this stage, these 33 factors were distributed in the form of a semi-structured questionnaire among the statistical community (Delphi group consisting of experts) and they were asked to rate the variables in the framework of the cross-effects matrix based on influence and effectiveness with numbers in the range of 0 to 4. These points were entered in the cross matrix to measure the direct and indirect influence of each factor and according to the score of influence and influence of the factors, key factors are obtained.

Results and Discussion

In the analysis done, the dimensions of the matrix in the Mikmac software are 33 x 33 and the number of repetitions is considered 2 times. The index of filling the matrix is 91.99%, which indicates that about 92% of the cases have influenced each other. from a total of 1001 relationships; 88 relationships have cross effects, 392 relationships have cross effects 1, 497 relationships have cross effects 2, and 112 relationships have cross effects 3. These results indicate that the number of relationships with moderate impact is high compared to other relationships, and relationships with high intensity form a small percentage of the total relationships. In the following, the analysis of the direct and indirect effectiveness of the factors is discussed. What can be understood from the state of the scatter plot of variables affecting the resilience of Zayandeh Rood water resources is the state of instability of the system. After identifying the influential indicators and determining their role and importance in direct and indirect variables, the selected indicators are identified as the uncertainty of the scenarios, and the base scenario planning is formed. Therefore, 5 scenarios were prepared based on uncertainties

Conclusion

With the expansion of urbanization and the increase of population in metropolises, the conflict between development and the environment is gradually revealed. In the meantime, the ecological power of the regions is limited to each region. In the area of the central plateau of Iran, the amount of population settlement has never been as high as it is today. Therefore, urbanization in the central plateau of Iran has created many problems for natural resources. On the other hand, the distribution of the population in the area with natural resources, including water sources, is not consistent, because the rainfall occurs in the western area of the watershed, but the majority of the people and the population live in other parts. Therefore, the conflict of interests between citizens and villagers is observed in the use of water resources and the consumption pattern, and the need to use technology to manage and reuse water resources has become particularly important. Heterogeneous rainfall distribution within the catchment area has doubled the importance of the interaction of people groups with each other. The development of industrial and service jobs should be done with the approach of reducing jobs dependent on water resources to reduce water consumption