Iran calling

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Massoumeh Ebtekar

Massoumeh Ebtekar, former Iranian vice-president, was head of the Department of Environment (DOE) from 1997 to 2005. During her term at DOE Ebtekar restructured the country's environmental sector, raising the number of environmental NGOs from 20 to 650 and the percentage of academically trained DOE staff from 30 to 70 per cent. She introduced re- forestation programmes and worked to improve air, water and soil quality, equipping thousands of environmentalists and raising awareness throughout society. Speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly , she said:

When I began work on the environment in Iran I came up against several serious obstacles. The first was the long history of neglect -- the environment was not on government agendas and hardly figured in the media or the work of civil society. We had to make sure the government understood its importance and integrated it into its ambitious economic programme, and we had to encourage investment in a virtually new sector -- which is always difficult when you have underdevelopment.

In 1997, reforms started in Iran. The country was moving forward as we witnessed more openness and political freedom, together with the launching of [former] President Mohamed Khatami's very strong economic programme -- a favourable atmosphere, all things considered, since we could ride on the positive tide. But written into this was the difficulty of dealing with the environment at a time of economic growth, because people think environmental concerns will slow down the process and incur costs. We had to explain the rewards, and demonstrate the feasibility of the environmental project.

There is a wide range of measures you can take. Having established inspection standards, we started working on reducing vehicle emissions -- implementing the programme in all 55 of our car production lines, closing down five. In 1999, when we started, there was no control whatsoever. We managed to convince producers that without environmental measures, they would be unable to compete internationally. We introduced fines and penalties, but also an incentive scheme whereby we annually granted 15 factories a significant award to be spent on advertising and PR. In the mean time we worked closely with the media and in schools to raise awareness of the issues at stake.

I do think Iran needs different energy resources. We have suffered greatly from oil fuels, which pollute water and soil. We need solar, nuclear and hydropower energies. We are investing in alternative energy resources now. About five per cent of the country's energy is now derived from hydropower, less than one per cent from solar energy; we have several wind turbines in place in various parts of Iran; and we are working into neo-thermal energy. We are also working hard on natural gas, which is cleaner. We have the second-highest natural gas reserves in the world, after Russia.

For its part nuclear energy is being developed purely for this reason. The global hype on the issue is political -- unable to control the Islamic Republic of Iran, the West calls it a rogue state and accuses if of nuclear armament. It is unfortunate. They don't understand what is happening in Iran, just as they don't understand the rest of the Muslim world.