Applying the enhanced Water Poverty Index (eWPI) to analyze water scarcity and income poverty relation in Beheshtabad Basin, Iran

Abstract The close relationship between water and poverty has been proven in several types of research. The Water Poverty Index is an interdisciplinary approach for quantifying the socioeconomic aspects of water scarcity. The enhanced Water Poverty Index (eWPI) is aggregated in five components: Resources, Access, Capacity, Use, and Environment in a Pressure-State-Response framework. In this research, eWPI is computed on two scales: for four community centers and for the Beheshtabad Basin. Because this index is weightless, and undoubtedly the importance of each parameter is different, the preference of different variables is included in the calculation. The importance of the parameters is based on the opinion of experts, and for this reason, Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Analytical Network Process (ANP) are used for weighting eWPI components in Beheshtabad Basin. According to the results, Use (U) and Capacity (C) have the lowest score among the main criteria. The average value of weightless eWPI for the watershed is 0.605 and Kiar and Farsan counties have gained less than this average. The results show the priority of the main criteria is as follows: R, A, U, E, and C, for AHP and R, E, C, A, and U for ANP. The weights obtained through ANP are more homogeneous and there is less difference between the main criteria, while in AHP, the Resources criterion (R) has gained relatively large weight compared to the other factors. The score of eWPI for AHP-weighted and ANP-weighted indices are 0.5944 and 0.626, respectively