Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 6
By Fatih Karimov - Trend:
Iran has prepared a 5-year plan to restore its underground water resources.
Iranian Energy Minister Hamid Chitchian said that 750 million cubic meters of underground water reserves has been saved over the past two years through shutting some 8,000 unauthorized wells, Iran's Fars news agency reported on September 6.
It is a source of concern that 5.7 billion cubic meters of underground water is extracted annually more than the intake of aquifers, he said.
In the current crop year (started on September 23, 2014), 192 millimeters of rainfall has been registered, a 13 percent decreases year on year, the minister noted.
There are 609 plains across the country, in 303 of which extraction of water is higher than intake, Chitchian said.
Meanwhile Sattar Mahmoudi, the Islamic Republic's deputy minister of energy earlier said that recovering the used groundwater reserves in Iran is impossible.
The level of the country's aquifers has fallen by 20 meters due to inappropriate use of water resources during the past few years, Mahmoudi said.
The volume of excessive water extraction from the country's water resources amounted for some 100 billion cubic meters in recent years, the official said.
Iran's total annual water consumption is approximately 93 billion cubic meters, out of which about 92 percent is used in agriculture (86 billion cubic meters), 6.6 percent in municipality (6.18 billion cubic meters), and 1.2 percent in industry (1.12 billion cubic meters), according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Up to 70 percent of water used in the agriculture sector is being wasted, Iranian officials say.