Allocating the Surface Water Resources of the Urmia Lake Basin to the Stakeholder Provinces by Distance Based Decision Making Methods

Urmia Lake is the largest inland lake of the country and the second largest saline lake in the world. Due to climate change, decrease of precipitation, overuse of surface water resources and low agricultural efficiency in the Urmia Lake Basin water level of the lake decreased and its water salinity increased. The average surface water amount of this basin is 7.2 billion cubic meters per year that this amount should provide the minimum environmental requirement of Urmia Lake (about 3.1 billion cubic meters per year). Thus, control and optimal allocation of surface water resources (4.1 billion cubic meters per year) to three stakeholder provinces (West Azerbaijan, East Azerbaijan and Kurdistan) is an important issue that must be considered. This paper introduces a multi-criteria decision making model as a possible approach to the problem of allocating the water resources of the Urmia Lake basin to all neighboring provinces. In this paper by using of simple additive weighting, compromise programming and TOPSIS methods and by considering the social, economical and environmental criteria the share of each stakeholder is obtained and then abilities of these methods are compared. According to the results of the compromise programming method, the shares of West Azerbaijan, East Azerbaijan and Kurdistan provinces respectively are 1.804, 1.312 and 0.984 billion cubic meters per year.