Abstract
In some areas of the world, water reservoirs are the main water resources available for different purposes, including hydroelectricity, irrigation, residential and industrial water supply, recreation, flood protection, etc. However, a large amount of water is wasted through evaporation from the reservoirs’ surface area. In this study, a novel approach was developed based on the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process to allocate the blue water footprint of reservoirs (WFres) for different purposes including hydroelectricity, irrigation, water supply, recreation and flood protection. The effectiveness of the proposed approach was verified in Zayanderud multi-objective reservoir in Iran as a case study. The results showed that the environmental and social as well as the economic criteria with the local weight of 0.4 had the largest share of WFres. In addition, it was found that the highest allocation coefficient of WFres was for irrigation with the global weight of 0.412, followed by urban drinking water supply, recreation, hydroelectricity, and flood protection. Besides, the blue water footprint assessment of hydroelectricity generation showed that the previous studies had often overestimated the impact of hydroelectricity generation on water scarcity.
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Golabi, M.R., Radmanesh, F. A new approach to the allocation of the blue water footprint of reservoirs using fuzzy AHP model. Model. Earth Syst. Environ. 6, 793–797 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40808-019-00706-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40808-019-00706-8