Designing Scenario for Changing the Cultivation Pattern for the Sustainability of Water Resources in West Azerbaijan Province using a Dynamic System

Mismanagement and uncontrolled abstraction of water resources, especially in the agricultural sector, with the allocation of more than 90% of water consumption, will exacerbate the water crisis and the continuation of this process will make it catastrophic in the future.The present study investigates the effect of changing cultivation patterns on the sustainability of water resources and agricultural production in West Azerbaijan province.

This research has modeled two effective water resources subsystems hydrology and economic by using statistical data from 1991 to 2017, and the main variables were simulated up to the horizon of 1430. After calibration by simple genetic algorithm and verification under extreme condition tests, the scenarios of the current cropping pattern, low-consumption cultivation pattern and economic cultivation indicators, groundwater sustainable index (SUI) and water Exploitation index (WEI+), the impact of scenarios was evaluated.

The results indicated that the continuation of the current cultivation pattern reduces the volume of groundwater by 93/34% and the available surface water by 20% to the horizon of 1430; While the low-consumption cultivation pattern with a reduction of 52.88% in agricultural water demand by eliminating crops with high water requirements (beets) and allocating the cultivation area to crops with low water requirements (barley and canola) and increasing fallow by 10%, in addition on 53.72% improvement of water productivity, it  increases the potential of groundwater 13.69 times and the available surface water 2.45 times, and with a positive effect on the sustainability Index (SUI) and water Exploitation Index (WEI+) Groundwater stability and creates the least water stress in the horizon of 1430. Therefore, in order to sustain water resources, cropping pattern policies should focus on low-use cropping pattern.