Economic Sharing of Basin Water Resources between Competing Stakeholders

This paper describes an application of linear programming (LP) methods for optimal allocation of water among competing stakeholders that would achieve the highest economic return from water use in the agricultural section of the Sefidrud Basin, northern Iran. In a network presentation of the basin, the nodes stand for the supply and demand points and arcs represent reaches. The constraints of the LP model are the network structure of the basin (flows, stream geography and channel capacity), the available surface and ground water in each node, the environmental demand in different reaches, upper and lower bands of supply in each node and water balances. Optimal policies are derived for current and future demand. The optimal policies indicate that, at present, the basin water resources satisfy the demands of all stakeholders. Although, the results show that there is no conflict for supplying stakeholders' current demands, they indicate that the current proportion of surface water used is not optimal compared with the proportion of ground water used. The results also indicate that some future demands of provinces with lower marginal value of water are unsatisfied and that this could cause conflict between stakeholders. Since in some nodes the optimal solutions suggest using surface water even where they have available ground water, they are categorized as having a higher possibility to construct dams in the basin.