TEHRAN- Muharram Noruozi, an official at Lake Urmia´s Restoration Committee warned that the lake´s restoration will be highly unlikely without local people´s cooperation, ISNA reported on Friday.

One of the main policies of the committee, according to Norouzi, is to reduce the amount of irrigation water consumption.

“In order to achieve this goal, workshops have been set up in the region to raise farmers’ awareness about the lake’s crisis and the consequences brought by its drought,” Norouzi explained.

“The purpose of the workshops is to raise farmers’ awareness about water issues and encourage them to cooperate in order to compensate for the 40 percent loss in agricultural water,” he continued.

“Similar workshops are scheduled for next week in both - West and East Azarbaijan provinces - and 27 projects have been approved to be executed in the lake’s basin for farmers to be more cautious about water consumption,” he concluded.

It is estimated that there are currently around 496,895 farmers in West and East Azarbaijan provinces and the lake is central to their economy, as the main industry in the basin is agriculture.

Recent studies show that the water´s surface area shrank by approximately 80 percent of its original size at the end of the dry season in 2013, and, by approximately 70 percent at the end of the rainy season during the same year.

 Iran with Japan´s cooperation is now executing a new plan “Integrated Participatory Crop Management” (IPCM) in the area which relies to a large extent on farmers’ determination to save Lake Urmia