Dynamic Water Balance Accounting-Based Vulnerability Evaluation Considering Social Aspects

To advance proper planning, water accounting (WA) could provide the possibility of linking physical and operational data to their interdisciplinary attributes. In its new form, WA, combined with a dynamic model considering socio-economic aspects, is a valuable tool for rectifying today's water issues. The social water-accounting-based system dynamics (SWA-SD) model provides a feedback-based platform to better support flexible decision-making. Analyzing the indicators that correspond to water security in the context of DPSIR (driving force-pressure-state-impact-response) and SWA-SD combined with principal component analysis (PCA) for identifying data patterns is applied to a generic study area suffering from water stress to assess the environmental, economic, and social vulnerabilities. The water accounting has to be based on water balance data (called water accounting balance). As a practical solution to generate water balance data, a time series using basic climatic and hydrologic data is synthesized. According to the results, the water stress and urbanization index were increased by 43% and 64% in 2020 during a 20-year time horizon, respectively, which is alarming for the region. Moreover, the economic and social water resources vulnerability shows an upward trend. The environmental component shows many ups (as much as 2.24) and downs (as low as 0.73) due to different supply measures responding to the increasing demands. This study provides a basis that can be replicated for other developing regions to quantify this type of important planning information and for implementing different socially sensitive triggers and technically feasible to measure water vulnerabilities.