Regional Impacts of Urban and Industrial Development on Closed Watersheds of Semi- Arid and Arid Zones; Yazd Region

Although urban and industrial development in arid regions of Iran has lead to landscape degradation and desertification, in order to answer the need for development of such places, these types of development have always been encouraged by planners and policymakers. Whereas the shortcomings of present models of land use planning and carrying capacity determination, such developmental pattern has heavy environmental and cultural resource destruction. Ecological analysis in landscape scale shows that the wrong configuration and spatial arrangement of these land uses beside the scares water and vegetation resource of the area leads to destruction and change of these essential and fragile elements of landscape. Financial and social supports given to this type of development, has changed the conservation priorities of natural resources to over usage and even destruction of them in these types of regions. In this research, environmental impacts of urban and industrial development are investigated in ecosystem, landscape and regional scales. The results show that the configuration and composition and weight of industrial and urban development in the study area are much further than the environmental capability and carrying capacity of the study area.