Abstract

     Based on the scores and trends of Sustainable Development Goals, Iran, our case study, has been unsuccessful in nearly all the pillars of sustainable development despite the variations in socioeconomic variables related to the SDGs. This implies a comprehensive underdevelopment in Iran, necessitating the improvement of infrastructure which significantly affects all the pillars of sustainable development including environment, health, and economy. This study, takes transportation as an important infrastructure which has various direct and indirect impacts on all pillars of sustainable development, especially in the case study of Iran. To evaluate this, the present study aims to investigate 1) which sustainability perspective dominates in Iran (strong sustainability, weak sustainability, or health-centered sustainability); and 2) the consistency degree of each transportation mode with each pillar of sustainability including environment, health, and economy. We employ VAR and simultaneous equations system to find which perspective of sustainable development dominates Iran; and to rank the transportations modes in accordance with their consistency with sustainable development in Iran during 1979–۲۰۱۶٫ Overall, the results of this study is found to be significant and support the strong sustainability perspective in Iran. The most compliant transportation modes with the sustainable development in Iran are then ranked as: a) rail, b) air, c) road, and d) maritime transportation. These results suggest the policy-makers to: 1) value the environmental issues at the top of the agenda for the sustainability strategies; and 2) to shift the load of passenger and goods to the rail transportation by investing and developing the rail network.

Introduction

     Starting from the industrial revolution, the vast increase in the production of consumer goods, as well as urbanization has been taking place all around the world. Although such development has had a positive impact on the livelihood of societies, its social reliance and impact on natural resources has increased considerable concerns on this transition. According to the latest data published by the World Bank, the world’s total population has already passed 7.76 billion, and is expected to reach over 9.7 billion by 2050 (World Bank, 2022). Such large population require an ever-increasing dependence on natural resources and the environment [70]. Having foreseen such sustained growth in population, the United Nations (UN) has been one of first intergovernmental entities to organize a series of comprehensive actions over the last few decades to incorporate sustainable means in this socio-technological development. Agenda 21, for instance, has been firstly introduced by the UN in 1992, as a comprehensive plan of actions to enhance the human lives and conserve the environment at the Earth summit in Rio de Janeiro. Later in 2015, the UN published a set of 17 goals, commonly referred to as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs or also agenda 2030) which outline the objectives necessary to end poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, as well as advocating peace and justice [46,66]. Since then, the doctrine of global sustainability has advanced and become a key element of international sustainability studies and developmental agendas [13,56]. Following this, numerous studies have used the 17 set of goals as a playground to incorporate sustainability in various fields and industries.

Conclusion

     Based on the score of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Iran has been unsuccessful in almost all of the sustainable development goals and pillars. This implies a comprehensive underdevelopment in Iran in various dimensions including environment, social, and economic. To evaluate this, the present study focuses on transportation, since it plays a key role in each single sustainable development pillar in Iran.

     This research tries to find the most consistent transportation mode with the sustainable development pillars in Iran. To find a more accurate ranking of transportation modes, we investigate which perspective of sustainable development dominates in Iran by producing and using HEY model with VAR approach based on World Bank data during 1979–۲۰۱۶٫ The findings point that the strong sustainability perspective is most effective in case of Iran which implies that the environment plays the most important role in sustainable development, before the social and economic pillars.