Environmental management in Urmia Lake: thresholds approach

Abstract

Urmia Lake is a vivid example of negligence in providing the environmental water requirement rooted in prolonged droughts and excessive upstream water withdrawal. The aim of this study is to propose a reclamation strategy for the lake by focusing on estimation of environmental requirement thresholds under various drought severity conditions. On the average, the lake will remain in a moderate hydrological drought condition if the business-as-usual scenario prevails. The shares of natural drought, water withdrawals and water resources development projects (i.e. dams) in recent lake inflow reduction are estimated at 45%, 40% and 15%, respectively; thus, the aggregated contribution of human-induced factors has a more significant impact on the current lake condition than that of natural drought, and a firm and consistent approach to reduce water consumption by the agricultural sector is required for lake reclamation.

Keywords:

• Urmia Lake
• drought
• threshold
• environmental management
• water withdrawals

Acknowledgements

All data, including those of the rain gauges, hydrometric stations and lake level gauge, were provided by the Iran Ministry of Energy and are gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2015.1024829