Risk Assessment of Water Resources Development Plans Using the Fault Tree Analysis Method (case study: District 4 of Mokran and Bandar Abbas)

Nowadays, the improper distribution of rainfall and the decline in precipitation, in addition to the population growth, consequently increasing in water consumption and demand have made society dependent on the use of water resources development plans. Also, one of the long-term goals of the country water strategy is to strike a balance between the amount of water demand and existing water resources with regard to social, economic, and environmental considerations. Therefore risk analysis of water resource development plans based on sustainable development indicators is necessary. In the present study, for the first time, the Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) technique was employed in order to risk assessment of water resource development projects under the framework of sustainable development. After determining the top event, factors leading to its occurrence, including the failure of social, economic, environmental and water resources indices were identified. The proposed model was presented as a case study for water resources development plans of the “district 4 of Mokran to Bandar Abbas”, Moreover, for different scenarios, a Vensim Model was used for simulate water resources and consumption in the study area. The probability of failure of the Sustainable Development Indicators was estimated based on Vensim output and used as input to the proposed Fault Tree. The results showed that the failure probability of the best, worst and existing condition scenarios was 38%, 90% and 50%, respectively. Finally, due to the calculated high risk, the base events were ranked based on their contribution on the top event occurrence.