Editorial:Assessing the Imbalance of the Recovery and Rebalancing Plan

The excessive exploitation of the country's groundwater showed its impact with a 68.8 billion cubic meters deficit in the reservoir by the end of the water year 2004-2005. In 2005, the Ministry of Energy, by defining a "balancing, artificial recharge, and flood distribution plan", began its plans to find solutions to control the decline and deficit in the aquifer reservoir. According to this plan, groundwater resources in the country's study areas were supposed to be balanced over a 20-year plan (four five-year periods), but due to various reasons such as the long-term drought in the country since 2008, the approval and implementation of non-expert plans, such as the law on determining the status of water wells without an exploitation license in 2009, the drilling of unauthorized wells by operators, the lack of necessary planning in implementing the balancing plan, social problems and dimensions, legal loopholes in the implementation of the plan, and the lack of allocation of necessary funds, the aforementioned plan did not make much progress and did not produce desirable results until 2013. These problems caused the reservoir deficit to reach more than 124 billion cubic meters at the end of the 2014-2015 water year. In 2013, with the reactivation of the Supreme Water Council, a plan entitled "The National Groundwater Restoration and Balancing Plan" was defined and announced, including 15 projects. This plan has not made much progress so far, as 424 of the 609 study areas in the country have been banned or critically banned (Iranian Water Resources Management Company, 2013). It is worth noting that groundwater resources provide about 57 percent of the country's urban drinking water needs, about 83 percent of the rural drinking water needs, and about 52 percent of the country's agricultural water (Islamic Parliament Research Center, 2013).