Investigating the Effects and Consequences of Establishing Sustainable Agriculture to Revitalize Lake Urmia

the main objective of this research was to investigate the effects and consequences of sustainable agriculture activity in the framework of the project “modeling local community participation in lake Urmia restoration via establishment of sustainable agriculture and biodiversity conservation”. This research was a descriptive-correlational study in terms of research method. The statistical population of the research consisted of all participants in sustainable agriculture activity in the villages covered by phases 6 and 7 of the project in the provinces of West Azerbaijan and East Azerbaijan (N = 900). According to the table of Bartlett et al. (2001), 251 persons of the participants were selected using multi-stage random sampling method. A questionnaire was used to collect the data. The validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by a panel of experts. A pilot study was conducted to determine the reliability of the research instrument. The results of exploratory factor analysis revealed that the effects and consequences of sustainable agriculture activity were classified into three factors: environmental, social and economic, respectively, and explained a total of about 59 percent of the variances of project implementation effects. In general, according to the results, it can be concluded that in accordance with the three main dimensions of sustainable development, the implementation of sustainable agriculture activity has been able to improve the livelihoods of local communities through social capacity building and modeling the participation of local communities in parallel with paying attention to environmental considerations.