Kaveh Madani

United Nations University (UNU) | UNU · Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH)

The Groundwater Module within the Sustainability Nexus Analytics, Informatics, and Data (AID) Programme of the United Nations University (UNU) addresses critical challenges in sustainable groundwater management. Groundwater resources around the world are under increasing stress from overextraction and pollution, threatening water and food security...

Drought occurs globally and can have deleterious effects on built and natural systems and societies. With the increasing human footprint on our planet, so has increased the anthropogenic influence on drought and water scarcity, leading to the development of notions of “anthropogenic drought” and “water bankruptcy”. Understanding the human dimension...

In arid locations such as Oman, improving the quality of water released from a reservoir can be daunting. This is particularly true for Wadi Dayqah Dam, which struggles to provide sufficient, high-quality water for downstream needs. The study's objective was to establish more reliable operational guidelines, as well as identify vulnerable outlets a...

As the climate crisis intensifies, it is becoming increasingly important to conduct research aimed at fully understanding the climate change impacts on various infrastructure systems. In particular, the water-electricity demand nexus is a growing area of focus. However, research on the water-electricity demand nexus requires the use of demand data,...

High-resolution, continuous groundwater data is important for place-based adaptive aquifer management. This information is unavailable in many areas due to spatial sparsity of and temporal gaps in groundwater monitoring. This study advances the ability to generate high-resolution (1 km 2), temporally continuous estimates of groundwater level (GWL)...

Based on a multi‐attribute assessment of the environmental impacts and challenges associated with global Bitcoin (BTC) mining activities around the globe, we call for urgent action by the scientific, policy, and advocacy communities. The worldwide BTC mining network consumed 173.42 TWh of electricity during the 2020–2021 period, bigger than the ele...

This report offers the first multi-attribute estimation of the environmental footprint of the global BTC mining network, including its carbon, water, and land footprints. The primary objectives of this assessment include assessing the environmental impact of BTC mining, providing a global perspective by evaluating the mining activities of different...

This investigation is focused on the major but overlooked issue of unequal vulnerability of different groups of populations and communities to natural and human-made hazards. Conventional models of managing natural and man-made hazards that are driven by economic (mainly cost minimization) objectives ignore the diversities in the social, economic,...

Despite the coupled nature of water and electricity demand, the two utilities are often managed by different entities with minimal interaction. Neglecting the water-energy demand nexus leads to to suboptimal management decisions, particularly under climate change. Here, we leverage state-of-the-art machine learning and contemporary climate analogs...

Climate Change is indeed a problem for everyone, yet it does not have one global solution. Opportunities and resources are not equally distributed across nations, and as a result, the discussion of justice and fairness is a necessary component of potential solutions.

Although the UN concluded, already in 1997, that water would be the most contentious issue of the 21st century, water governance is still confused, nearly everywhere. Even the severe impacts of escalating water bankruptcy and global warming have so far failed to incur a marked improvement in governance systems. The global community has adopted sust...

The COVID-19 crisis has presented us with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink, re-evaluate, and redesign the ways in which the human population pursues development and prosperity. While nations around the world are developing and executing their recovery policies and plans, the United Nations recognizes the need for ensuring the integrit...

Cooperative game theory provides an appropriate framework to assess the likelihood of conflict resolution, encourage cooperation among parties, and determine each party’s share in resource sharing conflicts. In calculating the fair and efficient allocation of the incremental benefits of cooperation, cooperative game theory methods often do not cons...

Composting is one of the environmentally friendly ways of reducing organic waste. It is economically viable since it cuts costs associated with the hauling of wastes and enables farmers to reduce the use of fertilizers. Composting operations are relatively non-existent in the solid municipal waste sector, as the market has molded itself and grown i...

We may translate anthropogenic climate change as a reaction of our planet to our unsustainable economic activities. This research explores whether environmental policies have been impacted by extreme climatic events like droughts, floods, storms, tornados, and wildfires. We use yearly panel data from 1990 to 2017 for the OECD (Organization for Econ...

Study area Iran. Study focus Iran, once a pioneer of sustainable water management, is currently facing water bankruptcy. Aggressive exhaustion of non-renewable water has led to a suite of environmental and socio-economic problems across the country. Nevertheless, the understanding of Iran’s water loss is still incomplete due to a lack of conclusiv...

Until recent decades, natural resources had no major role other than serving as the fuel to run the engine of economic development and growth in the eyes of society, experts, and policymakers. Even in developed societies, extracting and exploiting such resources were seen as a sign of progress and success of economies. Over time, the effects of thi...

This book presents the most recent innovative studies in the field of water resources for arid areas to move towards more sustainable management of the resources. It gathers outstanding contributions presented at the 2nd International Water Conference on Water Resources in Arid Areas (IWC), which was held online (Muscat, Oman) in November 2020. Pap...

The Zayandeh-Rud River Basin in the central plateau of Iran continues to grapple with water shortages due to a water-intensive development path made possible by a primarily supply-oriented water management approach to battle the water limits to growth. Despite inter-basin water transfers and increasing groundwater supply, recurring water shortages...

The recent failure of two dams in Michigan has refueled discussions on removing aging and problematic dams in the United States. The large number of high hazard dams and the projected changes in extreme events posed by a warming climate suggest that more dam removal decisions will be on the horizon in the near future. Here we lay out some technical...

Significance Iran is facing a state of water bankruptcy that threatens its socioeconomic development and natural environments. Using an exceptionally rich measured groundwater dataset, we illustrate the extent and severity of Iran’s groundwater depletion and salinization problems during the 2002 to 2015 period, when the number of groundwater extrac...

The cryptocurrency sector is increasingly integrated into the global financial system. The world’s transition to a digital economy, facilitated by major technological breakthroughs, has several benefits. But as the demand for exchanging and investing in digital currencies is growing , the world must pay careful attention to the hidden and overlooke...

Economic sanctions have been actively used against Iran in the last four decades. In response to sanctions, Iran has adopted a range of survivalist policies with notable environmental implications. This study provides the first extensive overview of the unintended environmental impacts of international economic sanctions on Iran. It is argued that...

Traditional, mainstream definitions of drought describe it as deficit in water‐related variables or water‐dependent activities (e.g., precipitation, soil moisture, surface and groundwater storage, and irrigation) due to natural variabilities that are out of the control of local decision‐makers. Here, we argue that within coupled human‐water systems...

Understanding the complexity and feedbacks among food, energy, and water (FEW) systems is key to making informed decisions about sustainable development. This paper presents qualitative representation and quantitative system dynamics simulation of the water resources system in the Qazvin Plain, Iran, taking into account the energy intensity of wate...

As soft political tools, economic sanctions aim at isolating a sanctioned state and hurt its economy to force it to change course, policies, and actions. In response to sanctions and to evade their grip, a sanctioned state adopts a range of survivalist, aggressive, and unsustainable policies that reduce the economic pressure of sanctions at the exp...

The competition over extracting the energy resources of the Caspian Sea together with the major anthropogenic changes in the coastal zones have resulted in increased pollution and environmental degradation of the sea. We provide the first evaluation of the spatiotemporal variation of chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) across the Caspian Sea. Using remotely sens...

Anthropogenic influences can modulate the low-frequency variability of extreme precipitation and increase the likelihood of flooding events. It is not, however, clear how much and in what manner the low-frequency variability has changed in recent decades as global warming has intensified. Here, we investigate the contribution of anthropogenic influ...

The anthropogenic impacts of development and frequent droughts have limited Iran's water availability. This has major implications for Iran's agricultural sector which is responsible for about 90% of water consumption at the national scale. This study investigates if declining water availability impacted agriculture in Iran. Using the Mann‐Kendall...

On 18 May, the Edenville and Sanford dams, built in the 1920s to serve the people of Michigan, failed after a series of extreme rainfall events. More than 10,000 residents were evacuated, and flood waters inundated a major chemical complex, raising concerns of a widespread environmental catastrophe (1). These incidents, the latest in the long line...

Iran has been the country most affected by the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in the Middle East. With a relatively high case fatality ratio and limited testing capacity, the number of confirmed cases reported is suspected to suffer from significant underreporting. Therefore, understanding the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 and assessing the effectivene...

The socio-hydrology community has been very successful in promoting the need for taking the human factor into account in the mainstream hydrology literature since 2012. However, the interest in studying and modeling human-water systems is not new and pre-existed the post-2012 socio-hydrology. So, it is critical to ask what socio-hydrology has been...

We convened a workshop to enable scientists who study water systems from both social science and physical science perspectives to develop a shared language. This shared language is necessary to bridge a divide between these disciplines' different conceptual frameworks. As a result of this workshop, we argue that we should view socio-hydrological sy...

BACKGROUND: Iran has been the hardest hit country by the outbreak of SARS−CoV−2 in the Middle East with 74,877 confirmed cases and 4,683 deaths as of 15 April 2020. With a relatively high case fatality ratio and limited testing capacity, the number of confirmed cases reported is suspected to suffer from significant under-reporting. Therefore, under...

The coastal areas of Florida, United States, are exposed to increasing risk of flooding due to sea level rise as well as severe hurricanes. Florida regulations suggest constructing stormwater retention ponds as an option to retain excess runoff generated by the increased impervious area and to protect the environment by reducing pollutants from new...

To satisfy the energy demand and secure energy independence, Indonesia plans to maintain a large share from its carbon-intensive coal-fired power plants and natural gas, while incorporating some renewable energies in its future emery supply mix. While the promoted targets might be cost-effective, the potential impacts of future energy developments...

East Africa is embarking on an ambitious journey to improve access to energy and support its rapid economic and population growth. Hydropower dominates the region’s electricity sector and the current plans continue to favor this technology for future development. This chapter analyzes the desirability of energy alternatives across East Africa using...

The lack of holistic decision-making assessments has been the main reason behind Lebanon’s persistent energy challenges for a long time. Increasing the capacity of renewable electricity generation as well as conventional power plants running on imported fuels has been proposed to ensure energy security in Lebanon. However, this approach does not ne...

Global warming urges governments to decarbonise their energy portfolios. Many governments have indistinctly transited away from fossil fuels towards renewable energies. However, a sustainable turnaround calls for limiting the overall impact of this transition on environmental resources and the economy. This study identifies the most desirable energ...

Engineers face the ongoing challenge to effectively communicate for diverse purposes and audiences across multiple settings. The authors interviewed 10 practicing water resources systems engineers to collect their lived experiences of the use of water resources systems analysis in their workplaces. Thematic analysis was used to identify three key c...

This paper presents the first groundwater‒energy‒food (GEF) nexus study of Iran’s agronomic crops based on national and provincial datasets and firsthand estimates of agricultural groundwater withdrawal. We use agronomic crop production, water withdrawal, and energy consumption data to estimate groundwater withdrawal from electric-powered irrigatio...

The present paper tries to identify the optimal size of a wind farm using North European data. An empirical analysis of 61 sites constructed between 2004 and 2014 suggests that economies-of-scale are highly heterogeneous across on-shore and off-shore projects. A Varying Coefficient Model captures such diversity by making the impact of the farm site...

Problems have a high rank in decision making when they are both urgent and important. Accordingly, water has not earned the attention it deserves in public policy agenda because under normal circumstances it is not viewed as an urgent matter in the eyes of the public and politicians. By creating a sense of urgency, extreme events such as droughts,...

There is mounting evidence that human-made climate changes do project onto the natural modes of climate variability. As a result, hydro-climatic extreme events have become more intense and more frequent in the last decades. Yet, unraveling the role of climate change and climate variability in the occurrence of extreme events remains poorly known. S...

Hydropolitical conflicts between the Eastern Nile countries over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) are systematically analyzed at three points in time: just before the announcement of construction by Ethiopia on April 11, 2011, before the negotiations in early January 2014, and late August 2014. Hypergame theory, as developed within the fr...

Being the second-largest country in the Middle East, Iran has a long history of civilisation during which several dynasties have been overthrown and established and health-related structures have been reorganised. Iran has had the replacement of traditional practices with modern medical treatments, emergence of multiple pioneer scientists and physi...

Understanding the climatic and direct human drivers of abrupt drying of lakes in many parts of the world is a high research priority, particularly for water resources management and restoration. Lake Urmia, a shallow endemic lake in north-west Iran and one of the major saltwater bodies on earth, has undergone a dramatic decline in its water level (...

We develop a game theoretic model of the role of foresight in games involving users interacting over a public good. Previous research in this area has applied game theory to understand social dilemmas and inform policy initiatives. However, considerations of the “evolving structure” of natural resource games over time and agents' planning horizon r...

By combining long-term ground-based data on water withdrawal with climate model projections, this study quantifies the compounding effects of human activities and climate change on surface water availability in Iran over the twenty-first century. Our findings show that increasing water withdrawal in Iran, due to population growth and increased agri...

Decarbonizing electricity risks unintended consequences for other environmental resources. The European Union’s (EU) Member States (MSs) embarked on a decarbonization and renewables deployment program aware of this risk. However, uncertainty remains around which technologies are best suited to the nexus of resources affected. In this study, we illu...

Lake Urmia—a shallow endemic hypersaline lake in northwest Iran—has undergone a dramatic decline in its water level (WL), by about 8 m, since 1995. The primary cause of the WL decline in Lake Urmia has been debated in the scientific literature, regarding whether it has been predominantly driven by atmospheric climate change or by human activities i...

The rise of renewable energies has brought a new challenge in terms of the management of their intermittency. Pumped-storage hydroelectricity has served as the large-scale solution to the intermittency problem. However, flawed European spot markets and innovation are jeopardizing the future of this technology. This paper: 1) estimates historic reve...

Oman is a country characterised by high solar availability, yet very little electricity is produced using solar energy. As the residential sector is the largest consumer of electricity in Oman, we develop a novel approach, using houses in Muscat as a case study, to assess the potential of implementing roof-top solar PV/battery technologies, that op...

Only science can check Iran's crackdown on environmentalists, says Kaveh Madani

Urbanisation and climate change are augmenting the uncertainty surrounding the future state of the world’s water resource and are resulting in cities experiencing growing levels of risk of pluvial flooding. Drainage infrastructure is generally built using the paradigm of ‘predict and optimise’; however, this approach fails to account for erroneous...

Reforms currently under way in China's electricity markets bear important implications for its decarbonization objectives. The southwestern province of Yunnan is among the provinces piloting the current iteration of power market reforms. As such, lessons from Yunnan will inform future market reform and renewable energy policies in China and potenti...

The rapid shrinkage of Lake Urmia, one of the world's largest saline lakes located in northwestern Iran, is a tragic wake-up call to revisit the principles of water resources management based on the socio-economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. The overarching goal of this paper is to set a framework for deriving dynamic,...

During the recent drought in California, shade plastic balls, pictured, were released in the Los Angeles reservoir to reduce evaporation. By using the water footprint indicator that covers the entire supply chain of the shade balls, Haghighi et al. assess the extent to which using them is sustainable. https://www.nature.com/natsustain/volumes/1/is...

The interest in quick technologic fixes to complex water problems increases during extreme hydroclimatic events. However, past evidence shows that such fixes might be associated with unintended consequences. We revisit the idea of using shade balls in the Los Angeles reservoir to reduce evaporation during the recent drought in California, and quest...

Many water resources management (WRM) problems are similar in nature, and yet they continuously appear in different forms and in different geographical locations. Understanding a malfunctioning system structure is essential for developing sustainable solutions, which should be further examined using detailed quantitative models. Persistent WRM prob...

The uncertainty of a changing climate raises challenges for water infrastructure planning and design. Not accounting for nonstationarity may result in under-designed structures that fail too frequently, or over-designed structures that are economically inefficient. This concern is magnified by uncertainty in the long-term frequency and magnitude of...

Lake Urmia in northwest Iran, once one of the largest hypersaline lakes in the world, has shrunk by almost 90% in area and 80% in volume during the last four decades. To improve the understanding of regional differences in water availability throughout the region and to refine the existing information on precipitation variability, this study invest...

Sustainable green chemistry depends on technically feasible, cost-effective and socially acceptable decisions by regulators, industry and the wider community. The discipline needs to embrace a new suite of tools and train proponents in their use. We propose a set of tools that will bridge the gap between technical feasibility and efficiency on one...

Increasing population has posed insurmountable challenges to agriculture in the provision of future food security, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region where biophysical conditions are not well-suited for agriculture. Iran, as a major agricultural country in the MENA region, has long been in the quest for food self-suffici...

Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal. The views expressed in this Forum article do not necessarily reflect the views of ASCE or the Editorial Board of the journal.

This study explores a general framework for quantifying anthropogenic influences on groundwater budget based on normalized human outflow (hout) and inflow (hin). The framework is useful for sustainability assessment of groundwater systems and allows investigating the effects of different human water abstraction scenarios on the overall aquifer regi...

The Zayandeh-Rud River basin, Iran, is projected to face spatiotemporally heterogeneous temperature increase and precipitation reduction that will decrease water supply by mid-century. With projected increase (0.70–1.03 °C) in spring temperature and reduction (6–55%) in winter precipitation, the upper Zayandeh-Rud sub-basin, the main source of rene...