Application of Delphi method to Prioritization effective factors in water resources resilience in watersheds

Today, due to water stress Caused by reduced rainfall and drought in the country on the one hand and the growth of uncontrolled consumption of limited water resources on the other hand, formulating and developing strategies to improve planning, management, sustainability of water resources and consumption patterns in The country is a necessity. One of the most practical methods in this regard is to determine and estimate the effectiveness of effective factors in the resilience of water resources in the country. After reviewing related researches, it was concluded that most of the researches done in this regard have been in order to identify the effective criteria in the evaluation, planning and sustainability of water resources systems and So far, no separate research has been conducted to identify the effective criteria and sub-criteria in the resilience of Iran's water resources; However, relying on the results of articles and authoritative references, it was found that achieving the most effective factors in determining the resilience of water resources, using the Delphi method (due to scientific validity and usability at different levels) is possible. Accordingly, the present study has been written with the aim of identifying, screening and prioritizing resilience criteria and sub-criteria using the Delphi method. According to the first step of the Delphi method, first a list of criteria and sub-criteria was selected by reviewing the research background and then evaluated by a group of 24 environmental and water resources experts (called experts) in two stages. The result of this evaluation is to determine 3 ecological, socio-cultural and economic criteria as the main criteria and to extract 9 criteria and 18 sub-criteria. The result was that after prioritizing the sub-criteria based on two factors of degree and percentage of importance, surface water sub-criteria (spring and river) and precipitation with a coefficient of importance of 2.62 and 2.28 as the most important and permeability sub-criteria (drainage) and temperature, respectively. Significance coefficients of 1.23 and 1.31 were identified as the least important sub-criteria, respectively. Also, by normalizing the obtained coefficients for each of the sub-criteria, a linear formula was proposed to estimate the resilience of water resources.