Amir Erfanian

Urmia Lake is one of the world’s largest saline lakes which has lost more than 88% of its area in two decades due to continuous decline in the lake’s inflow. During the same period, the human population in the Lake’s basin and its water demand has increased rapidly and is projected to continue growing in the coming decades. Meeting the basin’s growing water demand as well as the lake’s minimum ecological water demand has become a critical challenge facing which requires implementing an optimum allocation approach which would be accepted and implemented by all the stakeholders.

In this study, we used a game theoretic approach to develop such an optimized allocation scheme under both cooperative and non-cooperative conditions. According to the study results, solving the allocation game using a non-cooperative approach would return an equivalent economic value of 1107.6, 1507.8 and 800.6 billion (Iranian Rials) IR to the Lakes upstream States of East Azarbayejan, West Azarbayejan and Kordestan, respectively. Forming a grand coalition among all three players and solving the allocation with a cooperative approach would enable the states to increase their equivalent values up to 1269.6, 1637.8 and 906.3 billion IRs respectively. Comparing to the non-cooperative conditions, this cooperation would bring additional outcomes of 162 (+14.6%), 130 (+8.6%) and 105 (+13.1%) billion IRs to the players, respectively which makes it more appealing for all the stakeholders especially West and East Azarbayejan to cooperate for the optimum allocation scheme.