Exploring and Assessment of Urumia Lake Bridge Project From Regional Sustainable Development Viewpoint

The regional sustainable development is a kind of development that has the greatest economic efficiency and the least social and environmental damages. However, sustainable growth is a kind of development that its main purpose is to enhance the level of economic efficiency. In sustainable growth it seems that environmental and social factors are next priorities and those can be set aside in favor of economic factors. Exploring the kind of dominant development in Urmia lake project is main question of present study. To answer study question, integrated Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method and for scoring selected variables the Delphi method is used. The findings of study show that the Urmia Lake project has been done on the basis of the principles of sustainable growth and it has been paid less attention to environmental and social issues (rate of the choice of sustainable growth about 79% and rate of the choice of sustainable development 21% was reported). It means that the Urmia Lake Project has sacrificed economic growth factors more than environmental and social factors. This neglect can be lead to disturbance of ecological proportions of region in the near future. Also it is predicted that this project will lead the change of role of west Azerbaijan province from agricultural to industry.