Abstract

The pattern of living and the form of settlement in Iran has undergone an unimaginable transformation during the last century. This pattern has reached the stage of urbanization from nomadism. This development has intensified the pressure on resources. To test this assumption, the amount of pressure caused by urbanization on water, energy and food systems in different provinces of the country was evaluated. For this purpose, the descriptive and analytical method was used. The required data were obtained from the energy balance sheet, Iran Statistical Center, Central Bank and Ministry of Energy. In order for the evaluation to be done in an accurate and reliable way, an attempt was made to construct indicators related to urbanization in economic, spatial, social and environmental dimensions. The collected data for each province of Iran was ranked by entropy weighting method. Finally, using the fixed effects model, the consequences of each range were analyzed.The findings showed that urbanization has an effect on the pressure on the water, energy and food system and this effect can be shown as an inverted U-shaped curve. The current position of this relationship is that it has passed the turning point of the curve. The difference between regions should be related to their economic development levels. The main reason for this effect is that the central region contains four urban complexes with a very important level of economic development (including Tehran, Karaj, Qom and Isfahan). Basically, high economic density leads to the spatial accumulation of human resources and financial capital and the knowledge spillover effect and causes the spatial reconfiguration of production factors. In this situation, the cost of innovation has been significantly reduced, the efficiency of using resources has been improved, and the same conditions reduce the pressure on the water, energy and food system. Typically, when the urbanization process is growing, better educational opportunities are provided and social and civic infrastructures are prepared to increase the environmental awareness of residents and encourage them to adopt environmentally friendly behaviors. In recent years, strategies aimed at reducing the gap between The economic development of different regions has started. Despite the benefits of urbanization, challenges such as lower economic development levels, unbalanced industrial structures and insufficient innovation capabilities have made it impossible for all countries to benefit from this process. In fact, water: the regression coefficient of the effect of urbanization on water is positive at the level of 5% and shows a high effect. The results show that this process intensifies the pressure on water resources. Energy: The regression coefficient determined the critical value of 0.246. Comparing this value with the average urbanization shows that the overall level of urbanization has exceeded the critical value. In fact, the negative relationship between the degree of urbanization and regional energy is confirmed. Food: The regression coefficient of urbanization with a critical value of 0.511 shows a significant U-shaped effect on food, but the overall level of urbanization has not exceeded the critical value. This indicates that urbanization at the current level has helped to reduce the pressure on the regional food system. In this study, the impact of urbanization on various dimensions of the pressure on the water, energy and food system was estimated through multiple linear regression. . According to the calculations, the estimated coefficients for population urbanization and social urbanization were 23.692 and 24.703, respectively. These coefficients have been confirmed at a significant level of 5% and 1% and it is clear that both significantly increase the pressure on the water, energy and food system, which of course is the effect of social urbanization more than the other. The estimated coefficients for economic urbanization and spatial urbanization were -217.82 and -67.895, respectively, both of which are statistically significant at the 1% confidence level. In terms of the absolute value of the coefficients, economic urbanization is greater than spatial urbanization, which shows that this phenomenon has the greatest effect on reducing the pressure on the regional water, energy and food system. It is very important that although the estimated coefficient for environmental urbanization is negative (-5.5982), it is not statistically significant.