Evaluation of Water Risk through Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs)- A Case Study of Tehran City

Among the 40 identified natural hazards, Iran is vulnerable to 30. Tehran, as the largest metropolitan in Iran, was fraught with perils of which drought and water stress are the most significant. Apart from, damaging the environment and creating or intensifying secondary natural calamities, drought can impair social, economic, political, and physical aspects of life. Unfortunately, the management based on the development of grey infrastructure has exacerbated the vulnerabilities and diminished Tehran’s resilience. This research aims to address the effective factors causing the risk of drought and water stress in the city of Tehran and asses these factors. The study attempts to scrutinize what are the most important priorities of vulnerability. Addressing priorities can serve as a basis for decision-making and multi-scale planning of drought risk reduction. Such urgencies contribute to adopting preventive measures rather than crisis management. The theoretical literature of the current research is analytical-descriptive, for which data was collected from books, articles, reports, and upstream projects. Also, to evaluate the risk landscape, the risk matrix was developed based on the interactive model, and then the most important causes of vulnerability were extracted, assessed, and analyzed using fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs). Research findings and the main drought risk scenarios of Tehran show that at the micro level, “high waste of water resources”, “change of land use and destruction of natural infrastructure”, and “urban development disproportionate to water capacities” are the main drivers. At the macro level, this issue is caused by repeating the cycle of “physical-natural-perceptual” damage and discounting the city as a human-environmental system.