Development and application of a planning support system to assess strategies related to land and water resources for adaptation to climate change

摘要

This study has developed and applied a planning support system (PSS) – a tool for plannersto analyze and choose the best policy instrument in order to adapt to climate change in theQazvin irrigation and drainage network, located in the central part of Iran that is mainlysupplied by the Taleghan reservoir. A comprehensive weather generator was developedthat was capable of regenerating statistical characteristics and linear correlation betweenneighboring stations. After downscaling monthly outputs from General Circulation Models(GCMs) using the Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) interpolation method, the weathergenerator was used to generate daily time series for the base case and projected climatechange scenarios. This study simulated the Taleghan reservoir daily inflow under projectedclimate change scenarios using the data fusion method where outputs from the most representativeArtificial Neural Networks and Hammerstein–Wiener models were ‘‘fused’’ tosimulate the reservoir daily inflow. Results showed a decrease in mean daily inflow inalmost all months. Biophysical input coefficients were estimated using the Decision SupportSystem for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) crop models under all climate scenarios.The projected production of all studied crops can vary between 86% and 122% of the potentialproduction under the base-case scenario. In addition, it was revealed that the net irrigationrequirement for crops will decrease by 12% on an average. The main goal of the PSSwas to maximize the total net income for the region. It can be concluded that reducingbank loan interest rate and setting two different water prices for surface and pressurizedirrigation systems can be seen as the best management practices in the region.