Integrating Economic Valuation and Environmental Impact Assessment in Iran: Challenges and Solutions

Today, environment is considered as one of the main components of macroeconomic policy whichovershadows other components. That is why the most important factor of and a prerequisite for any type of macro-level activity is its environmental compatibility. During recent years, many have attempted to estimate the costs caused by various environmental pollutions and destructions to organize managing actions and make right and efficient decisions on the design and performance of developing process. The lack of adequate efficiency in qualitative methods of assessment has caused a tendency to quantitative assessment of development impacts on environment during recent years throughout the world. This research has attempted to investigate the objectives of impact assessment reports in Iran, and provide a way to improve their efficiency. Among the existing reports on development impact assessment in Environmental Protection Agency, 50 were chosen from the different samples such as dams and water structures (5 samples), Petrochemicals (5 samples), powerhouse (4 samples), steel industries (8 samples), industrial estate (5 samples), refinery (4 samples), tourism (5 samples) and several others (8 samples) and then these options were investigated: currency and quantitative evaluation of the whole project, the highest pollution and impacts resulted from the plan, the most environmental factors affected by the plan, the quantitative impact assessment in two phases of plan utilization and construction, and the evaluation of damages. In the next stage, among the 50 analyzed reports 9 including the option of qualitative impact assessment were chosen to evaluate each project properly. Considering the fact that each project has a lot of consequences and impacts, we tried to investigate the most important ones (applying the impact screening instruction of Asian Development Bank). So the most important negative impacts caused by the project performance were extracted and ecosystem services affected were investigated consequently. According to the published guideline by the World Bank, there are at least two economic valuation methods for quantitative evaluation of each damaged ecosystem service. Finally, the challenges in integration of economic valuation and environmental impact assessment studies in Iran and solutions to this were proposed.