Goals

Within the “IWRM Zayandeh Rud” project Iranian and German partners have been developing and implementing a water management concept for the entire catchment which is accepted by all stakeholders. Both partner countries combine their skills to achieve the project objectives: to make water use along the river sustainable and to balance the competing interests of the different water users.

The German consortium consists of three scientific institutions and water management companies. On the Iranian side, xx government institutions, an educational institution, an industrial company and a water supplier are involved. inter 3 is the project manager and coordinator on the German side. The water authority in Isfahan is the coordinator in Iran.

The common goal is to use the example of Zayandeh Rud to show options for sustainable water management in Iran and the region. Now being in the third stage, the project team has been working on achieving this goal since 2010. The first stage served to get to know the catchment area and its most important water management actors and institutions, to collect data and to define the necessary instruments for integrated water resource management. Once this work was completed in spring 2015, the second stage (until the end of 2018) was to develop and test these instruments. In the current phase, the implementation of the IWRM concept is to be realised.

The prerequisite for this is that the relevant actors in the provinces, sectors and national institutions concerned increase their awareness of the fact that they are not only in the same boat, but also have to row in the same direction. IWRM means coordinating the measures to be taken and working together to achieve the common goal.

With this in mind and in close cooperation with the stakeholders, the project team has developed an IWRM concept and put together a complementary bundle of adapted technologies and management instruments, which is now to prove itself in practice.