The South Khorasan water resources integrated assessment at a strategic level using Goal Oriented Framework (GOF)

One of the most important steps in planning and implementation of integrated water resources management is water resource system assessment. To do an integrated assessment, system problems and cause and effect relationships should be detected and defined. But since different levels of assessment specially the strategic level is ignored generally, the cause and effect relationships are not defined well, this will result in modeling problems and so in system management. In this paper to do an integrated assessment of water resources systems in a strategic level, Goal Oriented Framework (GOF) is applied. GOF includes scale, domain, dimension, generic theme, theme and sub-theme parts. Considering all these parts the cause and effect relationships are defined and the indicators are developed. The south Khorasan province is considered as a case study. The indicators are determined using the statistics, then the trend of each indicator is studied. The results show although the water withdraw in agriculture sector is increasing the production and the value added per unit of cultivated area is decreasing. This means the surplus water withdrawal is used to increase cultivated areas, meanwhile not only the efficiency is not increased, but also it is decreased. It is noticeable that the agricultural policy was to increase the orchard area, but the indicators show the efficiency of orchards is decreased. The consequences of these problems are noticeable in economic and social sectors, so that the agricultural sector employment has decreased and rural-urban migration has occurred.