Investigating the Impacts of Global Environmental Evolutions on Long-term Planning of Natural Resources in Iran

The main objective of the current study is to investigate the impacts of environmental evolutions at global scale on Iran’s environmental planning. Thereby, all political movements towards solving environmental issues in Iran were accurately reviewed to find out the impressibility of the events by the global environmental evolutions. The findings indicated that Iran has joined the conventions and protocols with a time lag. During the period 1948-1993, the mean time lag between holding an international convention until its approval in Iran was eleven years while from 1994 to 2007, the average lag time was shortened to four years. As the results show, attention to environmental issues was improved from one note on First Development Plan of the country (1989-1993), to three notes on the Second Development Plan (1995-1999), and one complete chapter on the Third Development Plan (2000-2005). Moreover, one of the six chapters of the Fourth Development Plan (2005-2009) (about 20 percent of the whole program) was dedicated to the environmental issues. In the Fifth Development Plan (2011-2015), sixteen topics have been raised at Environment Chapter and thirteen legal articles have been proposed in other chapters with a focus on environmental issues. It can be concluded that there has always been a direct link between international treaties and major political decisions in Iran.