Coupling coordination analysis between urbanization and ecology in Iran

Abstract The coordinated development of urbanization and ecology is essential to regional sustainable development. Harmonized development of both urbanization and ecology relies heavily on understanding the relationship between them. Infrastructure and urbanization have grown exponentially in Iran over the recent decades regardless of environmental resources, leaving many adverse ecological impacts and severe threats to sustainable development. The aforementioned highlights the prominence of developing systems measuring the level of such coordination between urban development and ecological state across the country to identify the regions suffering from unbalanced development and compile sustainable development strategies. The present study thus aims to propose a comprehensive index system of urbanization and ecology, integrating the coupling coordination degree (CCD) model and partitioning method to evaluate the coupling interactions of urbanization and ecology in dual pressure zones (DPZ), urbanization backward zones (UBZ), ecology crisis zones (ECZ), and coordinated development zones (CDZ) in Iranian provinces over 2015–2020. Results indicated that: (1) urbanization and ecology levels declined in most provinces over the studied period. The urbanization level was revealed to be highly correlated with population. (2) The degree of coordination fluctuated from 2015 to 2020 and dropped by one level in 74% of the provinces during the period of study. 3) CCD ranged between 0.23 and 0.63 over the entire period, while most provinces were classified into the imminent imbalance category every year. 4) Most provinces were categorized into UBZ and ECZ. Overall CCD was revealed to be highest in CDZ, followed by UBZ, ECZ, and DPZ, respectively.