Analysis of environmental issues for integrated coastal zone management (Case study: Asaluyeh coastal zone)

Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM), as a regional management plan in Iran, is based on the conservation, development, and coordination-integration approaches. The conservation approach has focused on identifying and ranking the environmental issues, and presenting the action plan to conserve natural resources and overcome problems. One of the pre-requisites of this action plan is to investigate the environmental issues in the coastal-maritime area. Therefore, this study was carried out under the integrated management of the coastal zone of Bushehr Province aiming to determine the level of the importance of the environmental issues in the Asaluyeh coastal zone, and to present an action plan to protect ecosystems and overcoming of the problems. Accordingly, environmental issues were identified through reviewing the governmental documents and several valid references. A questionnaire was prepared based on the most important environmental issues and then filled by the elite community in Bushehr province, specifically Asaluyeh city, based on the Likert scale. The final step of the analysis was performed using the DPSIR framework. The Results showed that coastal-maritime environmental issues had the highest importance (8 - 11.75) consulting the elite persons in Asaluyeh city, which indicates the role of anthropogenic activities resulting in natural resources and ecosystems getting polluted. The high-ranked environmental issues are as the following: inappropriate landfilling and disposal of waste, improper disposal of wastewater, pollution of beaches with heavy metals, pollution of Asaluyeh estuary with urban-industrial wastewaters, reduction of aquatic reserves, population, and overloading of trashes on beaches. Consecutively, the air quality index driven by oil and gas industries was another important metric with a 7.2 importance level. The present research has presented an action plan consisting of 100 executive actions. Furthermore, the responsive stockholders and partners, as well as quantitative indexes for evaluation and monitoring actions through certain milestones up to the horizon of 2025 have been introduced. The measure to be implemented driving forces-based actions including preventive policies, reconsideration, and awareness of decision-makers; pressure-based actions focused on spatial land use planning and using natural resources; state-based actions including recovery, restoration, amendment, and empowerment of ecosystems, reconstructing the existing guidelines in addition to developing health and insurance for beneficiaries; and impact-based actions including spatial planning and beneficiaries’ failures, control and reduction strategies, as well as monitoring and assessments. All these measures were finally submitted to local and provincial decision-makers as a directive. It is also believed that the present research method could be inspired by other studies addressing the same aims in other coastal areas.