TEHRAN - Parviz Kardavani, the renowned geographer and the father of Iranian desert studies, died on Wednesday, at the age of 90.

Kardavani was suffering from bone marrow cancer. He was the founder and director of the Desert Areas Research Center in Iran.

In 2005, Kardavani was honored as an ‘eternal figure’ in the field of geography. He believed that even one inch of desert areas and salty soils are not unusable. Kardavani opined that in the past, these regions were regarded as unusable, ominous, damned as well as horrifying and viewed as barriers to economic development. But today these areas can be important, recoverable, and sustainable economic resources and help attract tourists. 

Countries that have desert areas should be viewed as rich areas of the world. Desert is so beautiful that everybody needs a piece of it for relaxation, he had said in an interview with the Tehran Times.

MG