International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—Saudi Arabia, although energy rich, is poor in its water resources. The country is part of the arid region where there is no access to any form of fresh surface water. Saudi Arabia resorted to the energy intensive seawater desalination for municipal use to support groundwater resources that is being strand by agricultural activity, putting a significant strain on the country's water-energy-food nexus. This paper uses population and agricultural trends to build futuristic water demand scenarios, and proposes a set of variations on population growth and agricultural policy. The paper matches those demand scenarios to variations of supply scenarios by altering the contribution of desalination. Exploring the effect of these variations on policy options assists in estimating the possible ranges of resources needed, either as groundwater withdrawals or as energy requirements for desalination, enabling decision makers to make better-informed sustainable decisions.

Index Terms—Water resources, supply and demand, groundwater, desalination.

A. A. Alhassan and A. F. Alfaris are with the Center for Complex Engineering Systems at KACST and MIT, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (e-mail: alhassan@mit.edu, anas@mit.edu).
A. McCluskey is with the University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309 USA (e-mail: alyssa.mccluskey@colorado.edu).
K. Strzepek is with the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA (e-mail: strzepek@mit.edu).

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Cite: Abdulaziz A. Alhassan, Alyssa McCluskey, Anas Alfaris, and Kenneth Strzepek, "Scenario Based Regional Water Supply and Demand Model: Saudi Arabia as a Case Study," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 46-51, 2016.