Water is an important part for the provision of all people’s livelihood, and it plays a key role in achieving sustainable development. Making everyone's access to safe water and sustainable management is one of the goals of sustainable development whose materialization will make community grow and progress. In fact, it is possible to create a way for public access to safe water, sanitation, quality water resources improvement, water use productivity and the conservation and restoration of aquatic ecosystems only through the sound and effective management of this vital resource. A prerequisite for such an attitude and achieving it in the first place is the availability of accurate and integrate information and statistics in this area.
By providing a project to compile the Physical Water Supply and Use Tables through relying on the international system of environmental and economic accounting for water, the Statistical Research and Training Centre (SRTC) in collaboration with the Statistical Centre of Iran as one of the custodians for registers has tried to take an effective step in the process. This project has been conducted with the cooperation and use of the information of custodial organizations in this area.
Totally, the water accounts consist of seven standard tables. Due to existing limitations in accessing data and initial information, this project includes only two main physical water supply and use tables. Hopefully, with the full access to the data and initial information in the next steps, other tables of the mentioned accounts can also be compiled.
The project shows a picture of the amount of water supplied and consumed in 2011 among various sectors, including household and various economic sectors. According to the results, the total amount of water consumed in economic activities and by household, obtained from the total amount of water extracted from the environment and the consumption of water received from other economic units, has been 144, 076 million cubic meters, of which 5, 132 million cubic meters is for households and 138, 944 million cubic meters is for various economic sectors. Moreover, the total amount of water supplied to other economic and environmental sectors (return flows of water) was 75, 737 million cubic meters, of which 4, 106 million cubic meters for households and 71, 631 million cubic meters for economic activities. Also, from the difference between the amount of water supplied and consumed, the amount of the wasted water is obtained the amount of which was 68 339 million cubic meters and the largest volume, amounted to 65, 298 million Cubic meters, is related to agricultural, fishing and forestry activities. We hope that this project can pave the way for solving the problem of water crisis for future generations to be able to use this national wealth.
The results of the study are presented in the final report of the proposed project and the report is available to interested people.
The complete report of this research project is available at “Store” section of the SRTC’s website at www.srtc.ac.ir