Feasibility of Combining Two Issues “Environmental Impact Assessment” and "Ecosystem Services Valuation” in Iran

Despite of fifteen years old legislation of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) in Iran, investigations show that there are some kinds of shortcoming in the effectiveness and efficiency of these assessments. Although some of these failures were attributed by weakness in the administrative structure, but methodological shortcomings and lack of transparency had an effective role in the these problems. One of the main reasons for this lack of transparency is qualitative criteria for EIA that caused the impossibility of entering the environmental damage inflicted by developments, to the economic cost- benefit analysis. Despite progress made in developing EIA and Ecosystem Services Valuation techniques, different views and methods applied in these two fields of knowledge have led to separate results. In this study the possibility of combining these two processes has been investigated in order to increase the effectiveness of the EIA. Studies show that it is possible to integrate ecosystem services valuation in by applying the changes in EIA Terms of Reference. In fact, with quantitative assessment of the impacts, and choosing the appropriate valuation methods, estimation of the amount of damages to selected ecosystem services would be possible. To develop the TOR, 38 surveys have been completed by EIA expert in Iran. Results shows that the main reasons for EIA shortcoming are “lack of appropriate administrative structure, qualitative criteria of assessment and shortcoming in access to the information”. All experts believed that including the ecosystem services valuation in EIA process, will increase its effectiveness. The most appropriate stage in EIA process for valuation is assessment stage and the most appropriate level for valuation is scheming in experts’ views. The main shortcoming facing the economic valuation of the environment is the lack of specialists in this field. At the end a model has been suggested for Economic Environmental Impact Assessment (EEIA) and some suggestions is presented to provide the necessary backgrounds for implementation and realization of this integration.