Tavakkoli Nabavi,Ehsan

Determination and Assessment of Sustainability Criteria for Zayandeh-Rud River Basin

The necessity of determination and implementation of a viable Decision Support System for developing a sustainable procedure of a region is obvious. For this purpose, both of the approach and consequently the tools would be influential for decision making procedure. Hence, Sustainable Development is a concept which is absolutely needs a holistic, integrated and systemic approach. Many scholars draw a distinction between the two terms of comprehensive water resource management and integrated water resource management. As is unfortunately common in this field, different scholars define the terms in different ways, leading to confusion. So it is essential to discriminate between "Comprehensive Management" and "Integrated Management" before doing the research. Thus, along with using various techniques for supporting this idea, our emphasis should be on the integrated management rather than comprehensive management of the system by applying methods which can able us to monitor long-term subjects and develop strategies for dealing with the main idea of sustainable development concept. With aforementioned definition about two primary terms of integrated management and comprehensive management, we can organize an appropriate plan for efficient monitoring of the events occurred in the Zayandeh rud basin.

Firstly in this monograph, the current condition of the basin by an issue-oriented perspective was assessed and after that the basin’s complex system was modeled by the use of system dynamic tool. Also, according to the determined Dynamic Sustainable Development paradigm, all the active economic, environmental and social processes in the basin were extracted. Afterward, on the basis of current condition assessment sustainable strategies through Viability Loops technique were determined and as a result, indicators for monitoring sustainability of Zayandeh-Rud water resources used for balancing the destructive mechanisms in the basin were generated. By completing rudimentary materials of the suggested Decision Support System, the analysis and decision making procedure in the next part can be commenced. In the last part of the research, suggested policy packages under different scenarios for short, mid and long term were analyzed and ranked by PROMETHEE method. In short, determination and implementation of a Strategic Decision Support System (S-DSS) can be considered as the major outcome of the research. In conclusion, decision makers and parties have defective foresight and a blurred understanding of the Zayandeh-rud basin’s status quo and also parties’ conditions and characteristics. Providing information about the dynamic structure of the problem by systemic thinking prior to using MCDM techniques could help change ideas, behaviors and decisions to reduce overall losses in the basin.

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