During the Special Session of the D-8 Commission Meeting held under the chairmanship of Turkey, UNCTAD presented the key elements of the joint D-8 Organization for Economic Cooperation - UNCTAD Guiding Principles for Investment Policy making. Important agenda items regarding the forthcoming D-8 Summit Meeting were discussed. In January 2020, …
All schools in Tehran will remain closed on Tuesday because of dangerously high levels of air pollution blanketing the Iranian capital, authorities said. State television said the closure of primary schools on Monday was being extended to also cover high schools and colleges in the whole of Tehran province apart …
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Iran’s southeastern province of Kerman was hit by multiple strong quakes on Tuesday and Wednesday, injuring at least 18 people and damaging some 20 houses, state media reported. The first quake of magnitude 5.9 struck on Tuesday morning 35 miles (56 km) north of Kerman, a city …
Groundwater potential analysis prepares better comprehension of hydrological settings of different regions. This study shows the potency of two GIS-based data driven bivariate techniques namely statistical index (SI) and Dempster–Shafer theory (DST) to analyze groundwater potential in Broujerd region of Iran. The research was done using 11 groundwater conditioning factors …
YAOUNDE (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The Middle East and North Africa region loses about $21 billion each year because of an inadequate supply of water and sanitation, the World Bank said on Tuesday, warning urgent action is needed to prevent ripple effects on stability and growth. Poor management of water …
WASHINGTON - Afghan officials reacted strongly to recent remarks by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani concerning water management and irrigation projects in Afghanistan. Speaking at an international conference on sandstorms and environmental issues Monday in Tehran, Rouhani criticized the Afghan government's dam projects, which are part of several economic and development …
The global use of untreated waste water from cities to irrigate crops is much more widespread than previously estimated, says a new report. According to this updated assessment, nearly 30 million hectares are now using untreated water within 40km of an urban centre Some 800 million people, including farmers, vendors …
Recent hydrological modelling and Earth observations have located and quantified alarming rates of groundwater depletion worldwide. This depletion is primarily due to water withdrawals for irrigation but its connection with the main driver of irrigation, global food consumption, has not yet been explored. Here we show that approximately eleven per …
Iran has become the latest Middle Eastern country to announce ambitious plans to beef up its renewable energy capacity, outlining proposals to invest $3bn in delivering 5GW of new clean energy capacity. Speaking at an event this weekend to mark the opening of two 7MW solar farms in the Hamedan …
A new report by the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) confirms the important role that the world’s biodiversity plays in ensuring the future of sustainable agricultural development. Biodiversity, including agricultural biodiversity, is the very foundation of life on earth and intrinsic to the whole sustainable development agenda. The …
TEHRAN — Iran’s parliament (Majlis) on Wednesday approved clean air bill which could greatly help deal with sources of pollution in the country once in comes into force. The bill will be discussed in detail later this week, IRIB reported. The chief of Department of Environment, Masoumeh Ebtekar, explained that …
Widespread use of oral poliovirus vaccine has led to an ≈99.9% decrease in global incidence of poliomyelitis (from ≈350,000 cases in 1988 to 74 cases in 2015) and eradication of wild-type poliovirus serotypes 2 and 3. However, patients with primary immunodeficiency might shed vaccine-derived polioviruses (VDPVs) for an extended period, …
Opponents of food products with GMOs have recently elicited fatwas from top clerics, declaring commercial sale and cultivation of genetically-altered crops "not permitted." Local media is at the center of the campaign, with Tasnim news agency on Sunday publishing a letter to state officials by a group of university professors, …
Climate change will affect hydrologic patterns in the Middle East over future decades. Already limited water resources will become further limited, creating further challenges for water allocation protocols. While there is no integrated climate/water allocation framework to develop sophisticated dynamic allocation patterns, determining the economic value of water in various …
Like the famous Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and the Salton Sea in California, the salty expanse of Lake Urmia in Iran has been drying up and shrinking for decades. Now the lake, once one of the largest in the Middle East, looks more like a gigantic crime scene. …
We sequenced Early Neolithic genomes from the Zagros region of Iran (eastern Fertile Crescent), where some of the earliest evidence for farming is found, and identify a previously uncharacterized population that is neither ancestral to the first European farmers nor has contributed significantly to the ancestry of modern Europeans. These …
TEHRAN — A high-ranking working group headed by First Vice President Es’haq Jahangiri has been formed to deal with air pollution in metropolises of the country, ILNA news agency reported on Saturday. The working group is comprised of ministers of interior, oil, transport, industry, energy, and economy, as well as …
TEHRAN — 72 percent of people in Iran are withstanding prolonged drought, the director for drought and crisis management department of Iran’s Meteorological Organization said. Since the beginning of the current crop year in Iran and based on the indices of the past nine months (September 23, 2015-June 20, 2016) …
The ongoing refugee crisis in Europe has seen many countries rush to construct border security fencing to divert or control the flow of people. This follows a trend of border fence construction across Eurasia during the post-9/11 era. This development has gone largely unnoticed by conservation biologists during an era …
Outdoor air pollution worldwide has increased by eight percent in the past five years, according to the new data released by World Health Organisation (WHO). Based on the data gathered by WHO, billions of people around the world are now exposed to dangerous air and more than 3,000 cities are …
This study was conducted to investigate the characteristics of inflow and outflow wastewater of the Bandargaz wastewater treatment plant on the basis of the data collection of operation period and the samples taken during the study. Also the effects of mid-term use of the wastewater for irrigation (from 2005 to …
