Identifying the components of adaptation capacity (AC) of agricultural beneficiaries in the face of climate change lead to implementing strategies of better management in order to reduce damages caused by this change. This issue is of utmost importance in Iran with an arid and semi-arid climate, wherein about 25% of the population is comprised of agricultural beneficiaries. Accordingly, this study aimed to identify and analyze AC components of agricultural beneficiaries to present an appropriate model in the face of climate change. The study area was the Lake Urmia basin where the beneficiaries had been severely affected over the recent years. As a result, qualitative content analysis (QCA) based on the inductive logic was utilized as the r

The international legal principle of ‘no-harm’, as a customary international law, lies at the heart of numerous international transboundary water conventions, rules, and agreements. The current study identifies and examines the three most common categories of harm, namely health, environmental, and economic, in an integrated framework. Exploitation of the Kamal Khan dam over the Hirmand/Helmand Transboundary River internationally shared between Iran and Afghanistan has been selected as a case study. For this aim, an integrated modeling approach that links Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), Indicators of Hydrologic Alteration (IHA), dust storm events (DST) and crop production is developed to simulate the indicators and their paramete

Analysis of climate change impacts as well as conscious decision-making and long-term planning in complex water resources systems require use of innovative approaches under conditions of deep climate uncertainty. This research aims to design and evaluate robust adaptable plans under deep climate uncertainties in the agricultural sector. For this purpose, a combination of the Adaptation Pathways (AP) approach in conjunction with the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model is used to evaluate the robustness of adaptation actions and to design robust adaptation pathways under future climate uncertainties in the Hablehroud River Basin, Iran. Deep climate uncertainties are specified as plausible climate scenario combinations according to the

Ensemble Prediction Systems (EPSs) are increasingly applied for rainfall forecasts and flooding warning systems. In this paper, these forecasts and their skills are evaluated through relevant criteria, particularly by considering forecast performances for different lead times. Furthermore, to enhance their performance, we propose to preprocess the EPS forecasts’ output using bias correction methods. For this aim, forecasts for different ranges of precipitation as well as various climatic conditions are evaluated, which is particularly important for extreme events that can lead to flooding. The Karun River basin in Iran is used as case study, a large area including various climate conditions. The results showed that the performance of Euro

Evaluation of water resources systems and implementation of appropriate management strategies requires accurate and well classified information describing supply, demand, and consumption. The WA+ water accounting framework is a relevant tool in this regard. Earlier applications of the WA+ framework draw heavily from remote sensing (RS) data; however, applying RS data limits the application of the framework to past and current situations. Such analyses are needed for future assessments due to new management and climate scenarios. Therefore, the objective of this research is to link WA+ with the Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model to enhance it and to evaluate water management strategies through an integrated framework. The resulting syst

This study investigated the effects of diet change on reducing water consumption in Iran, while meeting its nutrition requirements. It also addresses how such a national policy could be effective at global scale in order to reduce water consumption. To address the issues, the concept of water footprint (WF) was employed for Iranian food basket which was divided into 12 groups. The evaluated diets included current (reference) diet, healthy recommended diet under the national food-based dietary guidelines and two optimized diets (minimized?total consumption WF diet and minimized internal blue WF diet) with minimum deviation from the reference diet. It avoids, when possible, elimination of one or more food groups as this would be unacceptable

The impacts of climate change on arid regions such as Iran are unavoidable, with agriculture and water being the most vulnerable sectors. Although the development of adaptation policies is crucial, the first step to this task should be to assess ongoing policies. The present study evaluates four macro‐level documents that have the strongest effects on water and agricultural policies in Iran from the perspective of adaptation to climate change. Two frameworks have been applied to evaluate the “integrity” and “maladaptation” aspects of the documents. It was found that the themes most often considered in the documents were ‘improving resiliency and adaptive capacity’ and “responding to changes in water availability.” The lea

Many river basins are facing a reduction of flows which might be attributed to changes in climate and human activities. This issue is very important in transboundary river basins, where already existing conflicts about shared water resources between riparian countries can easily escalate. The decrease of streamflow in the transboundary Hirmand (Helmand) River is one of the main challenges for water resources management in Iran and Afghanistan. This research aims to quantify the causes of this problem which has a direct impact on the dryness of the Hamoun wetlands being an international Ramsar site. To achieve this, the land use changes in the Middle Helmand Basin (MHB) in Afghanistan were evaluated for three time periods between 19

Water scarcity has always been a serious challenge for agriculture and food security. Hence, different strategies are considered to save more water and increase water productivity. However, the effectiveness of such water saving measures have not been sufficiently evaluated. In addition, they may have side effects like salt accumulation, which will be exacerbated in dry and semi-arid zones. So, any evaluation needs to be done in an integrated framework. Thus, this work aims to evaluate some of the most popular agricultural water management measures from the points of view of real water saving, water productivity, soil salinity and environmental flow. Such an evaluation requires both field- and basin-scale simulations. To this aim, a modelli

The rapid drying rate of the Urmia Lake over the past two decades has caused great concern. Meanwhile, a number of measures are proposed for restoration of the Lake, which are also costly and need considerable investments. However, there have not been paid enough attention to analyse how, to what extent and under what circumstances; they can be effective. This paper attempts to address this issue and apply the developed integrated model (i.e. SWAT-LU) and link it to the water accounting framework (WA+) for more accurate evaluation of such measures to save water in the basin and increase inflows to Urmia Lake. To this end, the changes of water budget components under different restoration measures were evaluated in the form of water accounti