Investigation and explanation of environmentalism in Iran and comparing it with the global situation

Due to the existing risks, measuring environmental attitudes has become one of the most important social issues today. The aim of the article is to study environmentalism and its sociological explanation in Iran with the cross-country comparative approach. Based on the theoretical perspectives that explain environmentalism, the effect of various variables such as economic welfare or livelihood poverty, social capital, gender, Religion and religiosity has been experimentally tested. Methodologically, the study was conducted using the documentary method and secondary analysis of World Values Survey (WVS) data in the latest wave. The 7th wave has been implemented in 59 countries (including Iran) between 2017 and 2020. According to the findings, Iran is placed in cluste 1 (the countries with a high score in the environmentalism index), and has obtained the 11th rank among 59 countries. The results show that environmentalism both in Iran and in the world is directly affected by education, economic well-being, social participation and Post-Materialist values and inversely by the variables of age, poverty and religiosity. Another important finding of the research is the different environmental tendencies of the world's dominant religions: While Jews consider economic growth and environmental protection to be equally important, Christians are more environmentalists and Muslims are more advocates of economic growth.