Integrated assessment of the sustainability of the natural environment

Considering that the effective planning and management solutions for the protection of the environment has become one of the most important international issues, Achieving sustainable development and ensuring the effectiveness of actions taken to move towards sustainable development has become one of the main objectives of natural resources and the environment managers and planners around the world. Therefore, researchers and various institutions have used different methods to assess sustainability and interactions between economic, social and environmental aspects of sustainability. Meanwhile, some of the assessment methods are based on systems analysis approaches and seek to integrate social and environmental aspects in the process of assessing the sustainability of the natural environment. Among the various methods, approaches such as multi-criteria analysis, risk analysis, conceptual modeling and dynamic systems, cost-benefit analysis and vulnerability analysis have been used to execute an integrated assessment of the sustainability of the natural environment more than other existing methods. The results of this study revealed that among the main existing approaches for the study of sustainability, Integrated approach can be considered the best one since it develops a rational and effective relationship between the results of vulnerability analysis and decisionmaking process and also presents suitable adapted options in order to adjust the devastating consequences on natural environment and meet the challenges in vulnerability assessment and provide a detailed theoretical conceptual model to identify the vulnerability of the natural environments.