Water Allocation in Inter-Basin Water Transfer with the Virtual Water Approach

The importance of inter-basin water transfer project is its ability to balance the nonuniform temporal and spatial distribution of water resources and demands, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. A water transfer project can be executed if satisfied some economics and environment criteria. In this research, a methodology is proposed for inter-basin water allocation using virtual water concept. Thus, an optimization model with an economic objective function based on virtual water maximizes the benefit of the inter-basin water transfer. In various scenarios of allocating water, the productions of basins that receive transferred water and sending basins and related virtual water are estimated. The best scenario must have the maximum efficiency and benefit based on value of water and production. The effectiveness of this methodology is examined by applying it to a large-scale case study of interbasin water transfer from Solegan to Rafsanjan basin in Iran.