A multifaceted quantitative index for sustainability assessment of groundwater management: application for aquifers around Iran

ABSTRACT

This study developed a groundwater sustainable management index including components of environmental, social, economic and institutional responsibility. Four significant indicators: integrated groundwater footprint, population density, percentage of groundwater used for agricultural and industrial sectors, and density of observation wells were adopted and executed for 443 of Iran’s aquifers. The results indicated that the groundwater sustainable management for 32% of Iran’s aquifers is poor–very poor, and this index is more sensitive to economic and social indicators. Finally, an inverse correlation was observed between the groundwater sustainable management index values and the coefficient of variation of normalized difference vegetation index (R² = −0.437).

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainability
• groundwater management
• multicriteria decision-making
• Iran

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Iran’s Water Resources Management Company and the Iran Meteorological Organization, which helped to provide the required data of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060.2022.2036930.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by The Organization for Researching and Composing University Textbooks in the Humanities (SAMT) as part of the ‘Assessment and Analysis of Sustainable Water Resources Management in Arid Zones of Iran’ project [grant number 100/12162].