Scenario-based analysis of the impacts of lake drying on food production in the Lake Urmia Basin of Northern Iran

Abstract

In many parts of the world, lake drying is caused by water management failures, while the phenomenon is exacerbated by climate change. Lake Urmia in Northern Iran is drying up at such an alarming rate that it is considered to be a dying lake, which has dire consequences for the whole region. While salinization caused by a dying lake is well understood and known to influence the local and regional food production, other potential impacts by dying lakes are as yet unknown. The food production in the Urmia region is predominantly regional and relies on local water sources. To explore the current and projected impacts of the dying lake on food production, we investigated changes in the climatic conditions, land use, and land degradation for the period 1990–2020. We examined the environmental impacts of lake drought on food production using an integrated scenario-based geoinformation framework. The results show that the lake drought has significantly affected and reduced food production over the past three decades. Based on a combination of cellular automaton and Markov modeling, we project the food production for the next 30 years and predict it will reduce further. The results of this study emphasize the critical environmental impacts of the Urmia Lake drought on food production in the region. We hope that the results will encourage authorities and environmental planners to counteract these issues and take steps to support food production. As our proposed integrated geoinformation approach considers both the extensive impacts of global climate change and the factors associated with dying lakes, we consider it to be suitable to investigate the relationships between environmental degradation and scenario-based food production in other regions with dying lakes around the world.

An overview of the state of urban resilience in Iran

“…Environmental resilience is strongly affected by many factors such as access to drinking water (Moghim and Garna, 2019; Nasrnia et al , 2021), total reservoir water storage, water production techniques, total precipitation (Liu et al , 2019), air quality (Zhang et al , 2020a), land cover and land-use changes, erosion rate (Cutter et al , 2008), the share of permeable surface areas (Datola et al , 2019), per capita green area (Liu et al , 2019) and proportion of blue and green infrastructure (Zhang et al , 2020a). Iran has recently confronted various environmental difficulties because of the drying of lakes and rivers, droughts (Moghim and Garna, 2019; Vaghefi et al , 2019; Feizizadeh et al , 2022), severe water scarcity, deforestation (Moghim and Garna, 2019) and the increasing urban population and demographic changes (Nasrnia et al , 2021). For example, 56% of Iran’s urban population suffered from drinking water stress in 2018 (National Water and Wastewater Engineering Company, 2018), and it is estimated to reach 63.2% in 2022 (Islamic Parliament Research Center, 2018).…”

Impacts of the Urmia Lake Drought on Soil Salinity and Degradation Risk: An Integrated Geoinformatics Analysis and Monitoring Approach

“…Urmia Lake is drying up and faces several environmental issues due to the impact of climate change and the intense anthropogenic pressure on natural resources. The impacts of climate change on the Urmia Lake drought has been addressed by previous studies [5,18,28,32,40]. The effect of the extensive land use/cover change on the Urmia Lake drought has also been acknowledged in our earlier studies [28,32].…”

“…The ULB, with an area of about 51,703.85 km 2 , is renowned for horticulture, agriculture, animal husbandry, handicrafts, mining, apiculture, industry and business, recreational-and tourism activities, and artemia and salt harvesting, which constitute the primary sources of revenue in the area. Based on the latest Iranian census [40], the ULB, with a population of about 7.3 million, is one of the most highly populated areas in Iran and is home to about 9-10% of the country's entire population. The 63 cities and 520 villages in ULB are threatened by the environmental impacts of the Urmia Lake drought.…”

“…The spectral reflectance characteristics of salt at the soil surface can be used to identify and monitor soil salinity [8]. Furthermore, well-organized soil management using the latest remote sensing methods and soil salinity monitoring plays an important role, especially in the preservation of arable lands [40]. We employed the eight best-known soil salinity indices to identify saline regions and compare their efficiency (Table 3).…”

QADI as a New Method and Alternative to Kappa for Accuracy Assessment of Remote Sensing-Based Image Classification

“…Recent progress in earth observation and remote sensing technologies produced satellite images with improved spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions, which accordingly increased the demands of efferent data-driven approaches [53][54][55][56]. In this context, a number of machine learning and particularly deep learning methods were developed and proposed over the past decade [13].…”