The Environment as Iranians See It

Iranians are worried about the environment but unsure what they can do about it

Lake Urmia, once Iran's largest lake, lost about 90% of its surface area in 25 years, according to NASA satellite imagery. In some of the country's plains, the ground is sinking 25 to 35 centimetres a year because groundwater is pumped faster than it can recharge, and Iran is one of 25 countries facing "extremely high" water stress. The air is no better. According to Iran's Ministry of Health, air pollution killed more than 30,000 people in a single year and cost the country around $12 billion. The environment in Iran has stopped being a side issue; it now comes down to water, bread and the air people breathe. Amid all the figures on soil, water and air, one question is asked far less often: what do people think? How worried are they, who do they hold responsible, and what do they believe they can do?

High concern, few ways to take part

Ask Iranians how the country's environment is doing and the answer is clear. Two in three people in this survey (67.2%) described it as bad or very bad. Three in four (76.1%) want scientists to have a role in environmental policy. Only 8.9% think environmental claims and concerns are exaggerated.

Ask instead whether they have ever come across a campaign they could join, and the results change. Only 11.9% of respondents had heard of an online environmental campaign, and just 9.2% could name one they considered effective. Put side by side, support for environmental action runs about six times higher than familiarity with campaigns that offer a way to act.

That gap is the central finding of "The Environment as Iranians See It," a Payam Foundation report based on data collected by the Beporsim platform between July 17 and November 18, 2016.

Hope holds despite the damage

People see how serious the problem is, but they have not given up. The most common view, held by 58.2% of respondents, is that conditions are bad but that serious effort can still stop the damage. Roughly seven in eight of those who call the situation bad believe it can still be repaired.

Hope for the next few years is weaker. Some 62.3% do not expect urban air quality to improve within five years, and 55.7% do not expect the environment as a whole to get better. Asked how they feel about the country's environmental future, the most common answer was neither optimism nor pessimism: 37.0% said they did not know.

Lake Urmia stands apart. It drew the highest share of "don't know" answers of any statement (19.0%, against 11.1% for air quality). When a question becomes more specific and technical, certainty seems to give way to doubt.

Daily harms rank above abstract ones

People pick their environmental priorities from what they live with more than from what they read.

The demand for action is there. Where is the way in?

The report builds two indexes from the answers, each scored from 0 to 100. The Environmental Alarm Index measures how badly people judge the state of the environment and its outlook; in this sample it stands at 53.4. The Mandate for Action Index measures support for environmental action and for a role for experts and civil society; it stands at 70.8.

Support for experts and civil society is broad. Some 76.1% say it is important for scientists and academics to take part in environmental policymaking, and 70.5% say the same of non-governmental organisations. The weak point is the economy: only 56.0% reject putting the economy ahead of the environment. That is the lowest figure among the five items, and the only one that asks respondents to give up one priority for another.

This demand has found almost no route into practical participation. Awareness of campaigns rises with education, from 6.6% among high-school diploma holders to 18.3% among people with a master's degree. Even in that group, more than four in five have never encountered a campaign. The report calls this a problem of access to participation rather than of awareness. People who take the problem seriously and want experts to shape policy have yet to find a clear way to get involved.

Social networks are the most-used source of environmental news (36.2%), but only 19.8% name them as the most trustworthy. The state broadcaster, IRIB, shows the reverse pattern: 29.0% use it for news and 34.8% rate it the most reliable. Another 14.0% say they trust no source at all.

Where is concern highest?

Concern varies from province to province. Ilam and North Khorasan top the table, although both have few respondents, so their rankings should be read with caution.

The bigger differences are not geographic. Concern rises sharply with education, from 43.2 among people without a high-school diploma to 65.0 among master's degree holders. That 21.8-point spread is wider than the gap between the most and least concerned provinces. Age follows the same pattern. The youngest respondents, aged 14 to 17, show the least concern (37.6), against 59.1 among those aged 35 to 44.

Men and women, by contrast, largely agree, with almost identical scores on both indexes. On the Alarm Index, men score 53.1 and women 54.5.

Read the full report

The findings suggest that Iran's environmental crises will take more than expert warnings to resolve. People who are already worried need practical ways to take part, and those ways have to connect to the problems they deal with every day.

This article summarises the report's indexes and key findings. For the full data and a closer look at the issues behind them, read the complete report, "The Environment as Iranians See It." It includes:

• Results for all 31 provinces and a map of where environmental concern runs highest.
• The full methodology, sampling limits and standard-error calculations.
• Breakdowns by age and education, and how each moves the Alarm and Mandate indexes.
• Charts and tables on news sources and public trust.

The full report, with province-by-province results and the study's limitations, is available to download. Payam Foundation publishes it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).