Relationship Between Urban Growth, Selected Economic Indicators and CO2 Emission in Iran

Economic growth is the essence of all economic activities and actions of governments in a certain period, which if not desirable, has negative consequences, including environmental degradation. The environment is one of the main pillars of sustainable development; in recent decades, the importance of the environment has increased and the quality of the environment has become very important. With the growth of urbanization and the development of communities, more importance has been given to the quality of the environment. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of the selected economical indicators and urbanization on the emission of CO2 in Iran during the year's 1980 to 2018 using Bayesian causal map (BCM) analysis method in five scenarios. Testing the degree of impact of changes in economic variables on the growth rate of CO2 emissions using one-way sensitivity analysis showed that among these five indicators, first trade with 58.78 and secondly private sector credit with 32.48 and then tax with 4.85, followed by urban growth with 4.21 and finally private sector investment with a reduction of variance of 1.04, respectively, had the greatest impact on CO2 emissions. The results of the five scenarios show that after changing the probability of high status of variables, high probability of CO2 emission is also more likely.