Provision of Environmental-Ecological assessment Indices in Rangeland pastoral units with a Focus on Sahand Summer Rangelands

Evaluation of environmental-ecological sustainability is considered as one of the most important tools in sustainable development planning process. Therefore, attention to this issue is inevitable in policy-making and planning. There are no definite indices in relation to assessing environmental-ecological sustainability in rangelands and range allotments. Consequently, developing and validating of environmental sustainability evaluation indices in order to assessing sustainability in range allotments seem to be necessary. In the present study, 40 assessing indices of environmental-ecological sustainability were studied through exploratory interviews and literature review and then were subjected to the judgment of university professionals, experts and local elites using questionnaires. For validation and consensus, in addition to descriptive statistics, Kruskal–Wallis one-way analysis of variance was used. Indices like animal diversity, visual quality, sonic pollution level and air pollution level received low scores due to lack of suitability with rangeland allotments in regional scale. Among the indices, the highest and lowest scores were related to rangeland area and air pollution level, respectively. In the present study, 16 indices, as six components, were introduces, which could be a start point for developing a national model of evaluating sustainability indices, creating database of sustainability indices and quantifying them for obtaining sustainable development in natural resources, especially rangelands. Also, executive organizations could apply these indices for improving rangelands and beneficiaries’ condition as well as moving toward sustainability.