TEHRAN – On the occasion of Government Week (August 24-30), 37 environmental projects will come of stream across the country.

The projects will be inaugurated in 14 provinces of East Azarbaijan, Semnan, Qom, Golestan, Yazd, Kermanshah, Hamedan, Isfahan, Sistan-Baluchestan, Fars, Mazandaran, Qazvin, Khuzestan, and Lorestan, Ali Salajeqeh, head of the Department of Environment (DOE), said on Monday.

The projects include renovating natural history museums; launching air quality monitoring stations; dredging rivers; building waste incinerators, and opening wildlife clinics.

The credits of the public sector for the implementation of these projects were about 370 billion rials (nearly $1.3 million) and the credits of the private sector were 1.3 trillion rials (around $4.6 million), he noted.

During the environment week (June 6-12), 88 environmental projects were implemented in 20 provinces of the country, he highlighted.

Dealing with environmental issues

Urban development, expansion of agricultural lands, large-scale tree cutting, and destruction of forests under the pretext of road and dam construction, which led to subsequent drying of wetlands and rivers, extinction of plant and animal species, sand and dust storms, and the occurrence of various sea and land environmental problems.

The projects include renovating natural history museums; launching air quality monitoring stations; dredging rivers; building waste incinerators, and opening wildlife clinics. According to estimates, 16.4 tons of soil erodes in Iran per hectare, which is more than three times the global average. A total of 2 billion tons of soil erosion occurs in Iran annually, and the volume has been on the rise in recent years due to heavy floods.

Each ton of soil is valued at $28 in terms of metal ores, so the loss of two billion tons of soil annually means the annual loss of $56 billion, which is more than revenues from the sale of oil and agricultural products, gardens, livestock, poultry, and fisheries.

Meanwhile, according to the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), 11 percent of the Iranians are affected by mild drought, 21.5 percent of whom also are under pressure of moderate drought; while severe drought is exerting pressure on 32.5 percent of the people.

The country has been repeatedly exposed to sand and dust storms due to its presence in the arid and semi-arid part of the world, so in 2006-2007, the dust storms originating in Iraq and Syria affected Iran, haunting a wide area of the country so that it reached the central areas and southern slopes of Alborz and also included Tehran.

Air pollution is responsible for around 40,000 premature deaths in Iran annually, Mohammad-Sadeq Hassanvand, head of the air pollution research center at Tehran University of Medical Sciences, has said.

Between 4,000 and 5,000 people residing in the capital city of Tehran lose their lives per year due to air pollution, according to statistics published by the ministry of health in 2019.

Abdolreza Daneshvar Amoli, an official with the Iranian Biological Resource Center affiliated with the Academic Center for Education, Culture, and Research (ACECR) said in 2019 that 150 species of animals in Iran are on the verge of extinction.

FB/MG