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Proposed Guideline for
Environmental Impact Assessment of the Ports and
Harbors projects in
Amir Hasan
Jafari Varamini* Dr.
Seyed Masoud
Monavri**
The expansion of
world trade and the human societies' need
for capital, intermediate, and consumer goods make the exchange of raw
materials, manufactured goods and energy a
necessary. Furthermore, the increase in exchanges due to
industrial development, and low price of sea transport together with its
economies of scale against land transport, has put more importance on
this activities. Construction and development of different ports in the
world, thus, have been more and more taken into consideration by
countries. The Islamic Republic of
Iran has a total coastal line of 2700 km, of which 700 km is the
Caspian’s sea coasts and the remainder of 2000 km is the Persian Gulf
and Oman sea coasts. The number of active
trade ports is 11: three in the north and eight in the
south. The northern trade ports include 16
docks with a total length of 2233 m , and the southern ones have 85
docks with about 14375 m long, all suitable for loading and unloading
general commodities, containers, and goods in bulk. According to the
existing data, in 2000-01 the total volume of loading and unloading of
non-oil commodities in the northern and southern ports of country
amounted to 37979833 t, compared with
19087000 t in 1990-91.The loading and unloading volume of oil and its
derivatives has also
increased to 36710344 t in 2000-01, compared with 4553000 in 1990-91.
Passengers traffic( arrival and departure ) in the Iranian ports shows
an increase of 1133926 persons too, from
1312650 in 1999-2000 to 2446576 in 2000-01. Considering the growing
ports activities during 1991-2001 , and the need for expansion and
development of sea transport industry, the environmental impact
assessment is deeply felt for mitigating the environmental
impacts. By doing the EIA, the possibility
of negative environmental impacts in
the implementing areas of ports plans will be considerably reduced. This article, while
identifying and studying the detailed activities affecting environment
and are implemented during the process of construction and commissioning
ports and harbors development projects,
tries to predict their possible improper impacts on physical,
biological, socioeconomic , and cultural
environment, and to propose appropriate methods of EIA and optimized
alternative selection as well as to appropriate methods for the
environmental management, reducing and controlling the negative impacts.
*Institute of
Environmental Engineering ,Tehran-Iran
Email:
amirhasanj@yahoo.com **Manager of EIA
Strengthening Project in
Fax: 98 21 8264004
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