Assessment of the capacity of current agricultural water management of Zayaneh Rud Basin for adaptation to climate change using Robust Decision Making technique

In the management of water resources systems, there are various inherent uncertainties which are exacerbated as planning horizon gets longer. Among them, the uncertainties related to climate change and their consequences cause serious challenges, which are also attributed as deep uncertainties, too. Therefore, it is crucial to consider them in developing any plan for adaptation strategies. This issue constructs the main objective of current research work, which applies the concept of “robustness” to evaluate adaptation strategies and respected decisions. For this purpose, the paper uses Robust Decision Making (RDM) technique, which is linked to Soil and Water assessment Tool (SWAT) model for the required water and agricultural simulations. The case study of this research work is Zarrineh Rud River basin with high cultivated lands. It is also the main feeding river of northwest Iran’s Lake Urmia. At this stage, the paper focused on evaluation of the current management of the basin to adapt climate change. For this, different indicators including: inflows to the lake, change in groundwater storage, evapo-transpiration and crop yield were applied. The results showed that the current management is not robust and fails in most of the projected climate scenarios. These fails are worsened as rainfall decreases and temperature increases more than 0.75 Celsius. This suggests necessity of evolving strategies, which can be properly evaluated through the developed modeling framework.