Assessment of Water Security in Iran at Provincial Level Using a Hybrid Index

Assessment of water security can be considered as a comprehensive approach towards analysis of status of water resources and water resource management practices. This approach can be especially helpful for Iran, which faces complex problems in the management of water and natural resources. In this paper, an index is developed for assessing the state of water security in Iranian provinces using the geometric mean as the aggregation method. Finally, the Iran provinces were ranked by this index and a number between 0 (for the worst condition) and 1 (for the best condition) is estimated as water surety index for each of them. The results indicated that the security index value can not be more than 0.43 for none of the provinces, which shows weak water security for all of the provinces. The provinces located on the eastern border and the eastern part of the central Iranian plateau, Sistan and Baluchestan, Khurasan Razavi, Yazd, and Kerman are provinces that face the worst conditions and had the least values for water security index (all below 0.22). Mazandaran province with water security index of 0.416 was ranked first mostly due to good condition in resource dimension. East Azerbaijan province due to balance and relatively good status in all dimensions was ranked second. Hormozgan province with water security index of 0.386, because of the best condition in economic dimension was ranked 3rd.