Iran faces environmental challenges such as erosion and extreme events, namely droughts and floods. These phenomena have frequently affected the country over the past decades and temperature rise has led to a more challenging situation. Iran started to implement national and provincial policies in the 1950s to cope with these phenomena. To provide an overview of Iran’s efforts to tackle land degradation and climate change, this paper examined through literature since 2000 the stakeholders’ policies, their interventions and obstacles to the mitigation of these environmental challenges. Government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and international projects have been the primary actors. Erosion-sensitive soil plantation, drought-resistant seeds, and water-saving irrigation systems were the main interventions of these policies. However, the research stresses the lack of coordination between these stakeholders, and the absence of a comprehensive database that could enable climate change to be tackled better in the future.

Based on remotely sensed imagery and socioeconomic data, this research analyzes the reasons why farmers choose one crop over another in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. This study mapped the area of the cultivated crop in 2017 with Sentinel-2 images. An accurate and new method was developed to extract the field boundaries from the evolution of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) profile throughout the season. We collected 386 GPS locations for fields that are used for crop cultivation, from which the NDVI profile was extracted. The 386 reference fields were separated into two groups: reference locations and test locations. The Euclidean distance (ED) was calculated between these two groups, and the classification was strongly correlated to the known crop type in the field (overall accuracy: 90%). Our study area cultivated wheat (32%), spring potatoes (25%), spring vegetables (27%), orchards (11%), vineyards (7%), and alfalfa (<1%). Socioeconomic surveys showed that farmers favored these crops over others on account of their profitability. Nonetheless, the surveys highlighted a paradox: despite the lack of a political frame for agriculture in Lebanon, farmers’ crop choices strongly depend on a few existing policies.

As the first-ever report in Iran, this paper explores the styles, tones, subjects, and patterns of the coverage of environmental news published in two Iranian newspapers. Involving certain initiatives and advantages in analysing newspapers, our research used the Structural Query Language (SQL) database management system to retrieve and manage data. A series of articles that covered environmental issues were collected and, based on 15 criteria, a database including 440 records and 6600 entries was formed. The analysis showed that titles and headlines of environmental issue articles were consistent with the contents and with the aims of news or events. However, environmental news was relegated to a small number of columns or spaces. The lowest number of news articles was related to education (9%) whereas the highest number was related to public awareness (56%). Regarding authorship, researchers had the lowest share at 10%, whereas officials and columnists contributed equally (45%) in writing environmental news. The highest (46%) and lowest (6%) proportions of environmental news were related to local and provincial news, respectively. We also revealed that Iranian environmental news is narrative and conservative with high reliance on non-scientific documents, interviews, and commentaries.