Lecture
Twenty-Seven Years of Environmental Impact Assessment in Government
This lecture examines 27 years of experience with environmental impact assessment within Iran’s governmental structure. Majid Makhdoum and Zahra Yazdani Parayi discuss its challenges, achievements, and shortcomings from scientific and administrative perspectives.
About this video
Environmental impact assessment is one of the key governance tools for evaluating the consequences of development plans and projects. This session, featuring Dr. Majid Makhdoum, senior professor at the University of Tehran, and Zahra Yazdani Parayi, senior expert at Iran’s Department of Environment, reviews several decades of implementing this mechanism in the Iranian state.
The discussion focuses on the institutional, legal, and executive ups and downs of environmental assessment in Iran: how far these assessments have been able to prevent damage to natural resources, what obstacles have limited their effectiveness, and how policy-making, development, and environmental protection have interacted.
This program is relevant to those interested in the environment, public policy, sustainable development, and natural resource governance, because it shows how administrative and developmental decisions can shape the fate of land and the quality of citizens’ lives.
