Conflict Resolutions for Sustainable Water Resource Management; Case Study

About 90 percent of water consumption is allocated to the agricultural sector in Iran. Obviously, the amount of agricultural benefit depends on the amount of water resource using. The farmer imagines that increasing the amount of cultivated area and irrigation will also increase amount of the crop and consequently his benefit. The assumptions of farmers lead to the destruction of the environment which finally will result in the tragedy of common pool resources. Preventing water resource overdraft in order to support sustainable development as the environmental object and maximizing the farmers' net benefits as the economic object, are in conflict in the short-term. It is necessary to find a balance between them. For this purpose, the optimum consumption of a water resource and farmers' net benefits are determined for the Urmia study region during the 2014-2015 crop year. This is done by using conflict resolution methods including a non-symmetric Nash, non-symmetric Kalai-Smorodinsky, non-symmetric area monotonic and non-symmetric equal loss solution in four crop pattern scenarios. The results revealed that increasing environmental weight decreases cultivated area and consequently agricultural net benefit in all crop scenarios. The fourth scenario is more reasonable and admissible due to its feasibility and acceptability by farmers. Also a comparison of the fourth scenario with the current situation in equal weights of environmental and economic objects and by assuming cultivation of major crops in the region showed that in this scenario the water consumption rate reduces 17% and the net benefit of farmers increases 10%.