Handbook of Water Harvesting and Conservation

8Road Water Harvesting

Negin Sadeghi¹ and Saeid Eslamian²

¹Department of Architecture, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, 81595-158, Iran

²Department of Water Engineering, College of Agriculture, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran

8.1 Introduction

The basic right for clean and potable water availability defines it as a great issue for all aspects of life development (including socioeconomic). Nowadays the growth of population, distribution of living districts, and increase in water demand lead to improvement in water supply systems. On the other hand, water shortage is a contemporary problem. As many sources of water are seasonal or limited, optimizing sources is an important issue in numerous countries.

Water is a fundamental input for a vast range of uses beside ecosystem, and biodiversity including domestic, industrial, agricultural, and recreational uses (Rosegrant et al. 2002; FAO 2003; Sivanappan 2006; FAO 2008). The increase in water demand (for agriculture, industry, and energy production uses) is predicted to grow globally over the coming decades (Connor 2015).

There is worldwide attention to the multi-objective and multi-criteria challenging task of addressing scarcity and environmental problems in the field of water (Biswas and Rahman 2009). In The Global Risks Report-2016, the World Economic Forum stated that a water crisis was the natural world's main risk of the century (FAO 2016). As a multidisciplinary field, water relates ...