Rainwater Harvesting as a Sustainable Solution for Managing Water Resources in the Soran Region -Case Study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.23918/eajse.v11i3p11Keywords:
Rainwater Harvesting, AHP, WSM, MCDA, GIS, RS, DamAbstract
Iraqi Kurdistan is experiencing water scarcity attributable to urbanization, population growth, and climate change, similar to worldwide challenges in dry and semi-arid areas. To address these pressures, there is a need for sustainable water management strategies that can sustain long-term development objectives. Rainwater harvesting (RWH) has become a relatively feasible and sustainable way to supplement water resources, but its successful application requires accurate site selection based not only on biophysical but also socio-economic factors. The study aims to identify the best locations of RWH systems in the Soran region based on Geographic Information System (GIS), Remote Sensing (RS), and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). To do so, twelve parameters were included, which are biophysical elements (rainfall, runoff depth, slope, elevation, soil type, land use/land cover (LULC), distance to streams, drainage density, and lineament density) and socio-economic ones (distance to roads, villages, and rivers). Two methods, the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Weighted Sum Method (WSM), were applied and evaluated via MCDA. The use of R-square (R²), root mean square error (RMSE), and standard deviation (SD) as performance metrics showed that WSM yielded more reliable results, with values of 0.8069, 0.0545, and 10.48, respectively. The suitability map generated by WSM categorized the study area into five levels of RWH suitability: highly suitable (32.89%), suitable (31.58%), very highly suitable (16.97%), low suitability (11.32%), and unsuitable (7.17%). The analysis established three prior locations for dam construction. The study found three construction sites for a dam (Nawroin Dam, Shekhan Dam, and Leraban Dam). Overall, the research offers a robust spatial decision-support system that can be used to plan sustainable water resources and increase climate resilience in arid and semi-arid areas.
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