Sharif Digital Repository

In the 21st century, the world population is growing at a spiraling pace. Much of this growth is occurring in developing countries, where access to food, sanitary water, education, and health is severely limited. The ever-increasing urbanization highlighted the need for sustainable development based on human-environment interaction. The excessive and unplanned expansion of cities has resulted in numerous environmental predicaments due to clearly emphasized economic issues at the expense of social and environmental concerns. The most significant features of megacities are indicated in this paper and the environmental, social, physical, and economic criteria are addressed in order to attain... 

The present study compared different approaches to assessing the environmental cost-effectiveness of energy policy scenarios. As a case study, the megacity of Tehran in Iran was studied. A key policy challenge in this city is to curb high concentrations of PM2.5 and mitigate the associated adverse impacts. The results demonstrated that in the business as usual case, the spatially averaged primary and secondary PM2.5 concentration in Tehran will increase by 30% in the 2010–2030 period. Adopting certain planned policy scenarios and the corresponding pollutant concentration reductions in Tehran shows that although most of the emission comes from industrial activities around the city, the... 

Urban transportation is one of the main sources of air pollution in mega cities, and urban job related trips can effectively influence the state of air quality. Tehran, the capital of Iran, with a population of 7.3 million, was selected for this study. The present model is designed to investigate the effect on traffic of the business working hours of different occupations and, as a result, on the status of air pollution. Daily job, non-job and recreational trips using the present vehicle fleet is a major factor affecting air pollution in Tehran. In the context of the present study, the necessary information was utilized to define some relations between job trips and pollutant emissions. The... 

In recent years, the construction of high-rise buildings as an urban development strategy has been accepted in many megacities. High-rise buildings have positive as well as negative impacts on urban environments. Therefore, the environmental impact assessment of high-rise buildings for establishing strategies to ensure sustainable and resilient urban development is essential. In this study, the environmental impact of high-rise buildings with a resilient development mindset was assessed. Resilience mindset provides an approach for including the uncertainties and interdependence of systems and processes for planning new sustainable developments and assessment methods. The corresponding... 

Urban air quality is a major concern throughout the world. The concentration of human activities in a relatively small area puts enormous pressure on urban systems and has led to numerous environmental problems which have created major problems for urban air quality management. The complex nature of air pollution, especially with respect to health impacts in urban areas, has prompted attempts to define the so-called indicators that condense and simplify the available monitoring data to make them suitable for public reporting and decision makers. Several concepts and indicators exist to measure and rank urban areas in terms of their infrastructural, socioeconomic and environment-related... 

The paper deals with an experimental study of the undrained cyclic behavior of a natural coarse sand and gravel deposit located in Tehran, a megacity situated on the continental side of the Alborz Mountain in Iran. Membrane compliance that plays a significant role in inhibiting redistribution of pore pressure and liquefaction in undrained cyclic triaxial tests performed on coarse granular soils is studied in this paper. Currently there is no or little satisfactory method for accounting for this phenomenon for gravelly soils, and thus the non-compliant cyclic loading resistanceof granular soils and the evaluation of the behavior of such material in natural and in situ state are not easily... 

There is limited evidence for short-term association between mortality and ambient air pollution in the Middle East and no study has evaluated exposure windows of about a month prior to death. We investigated all-cause non-accidental daily mortality and its association with fine particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and the Air Quality Index (AQI) from March 2011 through March 2014 in the megacity of Tehran, Iran. Generalized additive quasi-Poisson models were used within a distributed lag linear modeling framework to estimate the cumulative effects of PM2.5, NO2, and the AQI up to a lag of 45 days. We further conducted multi-pollutant models and also stratified the analyses by... 

The spatiotemporal variability of ambient volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in Tehran, Iran, is not well understood. Here we present the design, methods, and results of the Tehran Study of Exposure Prediction for Environmental Health Research (Tehran SEPEHR) on ambient concentrations of benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, p-xylene, m-xylene, o-xylene (BTEX), and total BTEX. To date, this is the largest study of its kind in a low- and middle-income country and one of the largest globally. We measured BTEX concentrations at five reference sites and 174 distributed sites identified by a cluster analytic method. Samples were taken over 25 consecutive 2-weeks at five reference sites (to be used for...