Assessing the Remedy Policies of " Urmia Lake" Basin Crises By A System Dynamics Approach

The Urmia Lake is the greatest lake in Iran and the second saline lake in the world. This ecosystem contains a wide numbers of animals and plants. Urmia Lake has placed in the northwest of Iran and has economical, social and environmental importance for local people. Unfortunately, in recent years, various and complex problems have decreased the level of water in Urmia Lake strongly and deteriorate the future life of this lake significantly. However, in the last decade, more than half of the lake area has changed to the salt plains. Many researches address the Urmia Lake crises in recent years; however, most of them are unable to model the dynamism of Urmia basin as a whole system in long-term period. In this paper, the critical factors affecting the reduction of Urmia Lake water level are defined. In addition, a system dynamics model, which is able to illustrate the behavior of the whole system of Urmia Lake, is proposed. The developed model is validated through comparison analysis and the derived results show the high accuracy (around 97%) of the proposed model. Three policies are proposed and evaluated to increase the water inflow and Lake level. The simulation results show that the hybrid policy has more efficiency than the other ones. Also, a prediction of Urmia Lake volume is proposed based on model till 1405.