National Symposium in Water balance

Due to increasing imbalance between water supply and water demand, sustainability of water resources has become as a key issue in national and international water policy making. The development of water quantity assessment focusing on water balances have been identified as a main tool for guiding water policy and management at different decision-making scales, such as quantitative management and efficient allocation of water resources. In Iran, the WBA is being conducted every five years for about 609 watersheds. Although the water authorities are provided different guidelines and frameworks to improve the WBA, yet there are many obstacles which lead to high uncertainty in water balance assessment. On the other hands, there are some institutional issues which is associated to the process of conducting WBA and effect on proper policy making including problems related to data and measurements, time consuming process of studying WBA which itself takes another five years and some stakeholders do not accept the final results i.e. the renewable water or some water consumptions estimates. It is planned to identify the UPWB through online questionnaire forms and holding different expert meetings which will be finalized in a coming national symposium. It should be noted that the national symposium has two parts in which the second part is planned in a strategic way to address some practical resolutions. This investigation will provide the results of unsolved problems in WBA in Iran. This note explains the challenges of water balance assessment in Iran and the neccesity of a shared vision to understand the current situation.