Transferring flood to the dust sources of the province of Khuzestan (Southwest Iran): a multipurpose approach to water resource management

In dry and semi-dry areas, the damages incurred to the cities and villages could be decreased by guiding and distributing the flood flows. The guidance canals and flood transfer are the most important tools to achieve this goal. This paper aims to predict the routes and guidance canals of the floods to the dust source of Khuzestan province (at the southwestern of Iran). Based on the flood peak points, area’s topography, protected areas, soil texture, and human barriers, 9 guidance canals are presented to transfer the floods to the dust sources. Then, the proposed routes are prioritized using indicators of executive operational cost (cost), the feasibility of flood distribution in the target dust source, the importance degree of the target dust source, flooding risk of sensitive areas, environmental indicator as well as the importance degree of the protected areas against flood in the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Based on the final ranking, the first executive priority is option 4, which is dredging and recovering the capacity of Maleh and Bahreh; these are considered as the recovery options and must be implemented in the Great Karun basin. The results indicated that the identification and prioritization of flood diversion options can mitigate the adverse effects of both flood and dust hazards in Khuzestan Province, something which can also be implemented in other similar regions.