Forecasting Water Pollution with Regard to Macroeconomic Variables in Iran

Water covers over 70% of the Earth’s surface and is a very important resource for organisms and environment. Water pollution affects drinking water, rivers, lakes and oceans all over the world. Water pollution is a major global problem which requires ongoing evaluation and revision of water resource policy at all levels. This paper reports the short-term and long-term relation between water pollution and macroeconomics variables GDP, energy use and population and forecasting water pollution on based this relation by GMDH algorithm in Iran. The result shows the GDP, energy use and population have positive relation on water pollution. The comparison actual and forecasting data showed that water pollution trend has increased between the years 1980-2012 in Iran.

Keywords:

Water Pollution , Forecasting , Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH) , Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL)