An Analysis of the future Challenges of Environmental Sustainability of Iranian Metropolises

Current cities all around the world are considered to be places for creating challenges as well as environmental opportunities. On the one hand, cities possess considerable potential to offer environmental sustainability solutions while providing the residents with increasing life quality. On the other hand, urbanization has added to the environmental threats. Therefore, to alleviate the adverse effects of cities on the environment, the concept of sustainable development has been proposed. According to forecasts, over the upcoming decades, the importance of sustainable development will become more significant for the world’s cities. Accordingly, having enough knowledge about forthcoming urban sustainability challenges can be an important step in planning processes. In this regard, the study is conducted with the goal of environmental sustainability challenges in 9 metropolitan areas with a population of more than 20 million that constitute 25% of the country’s population and 33% of total urban population of the country. Consequently, main sustainability challenges for developing cities are derived from authentic sources and delivered as mutual interaction matrix to 54 managers and planners of the studied metropolises. In order to select suitable indicators for understanding the challenges ahead of sustainable development of Iran’s metropolitan areas, extensive studies have been conducted in credible resources. In this research, in order to identify probable challenges in developing countries, the United Nations reports of different periods as well as other international organizations including UNESCO, the World Bank and Agenda21 are employed. The result of these studies is identifying 19 main challenges related to social and institutional sustainability and 18 challenges related to economics. The obtained results are analyzed in MICMAC.