The Middle East, which is experiencing severe environmental challenges such as dust-storms, is most vulnerable to climate and human-induced environmental changes. This interdisciplinary research project will run for three years. To consider environmental, socio-political, and economic aspects of dust-storm generation and control policy, the project involves expertise from engineering, science, and social sciences faculties of Lund University. The outcome enhances the ability of the policymakers and practitioners for environmental protection, sustainability, and resilience in the ME. 

To consider environmental, socio-political, and economic aspects of dust-storm generation and control policy, the project involves expertise from engineering, science, and social sciences faculties of Lund University. By creating a consortium of researchers from different disciplines, apart from ensuring excellent science, we intend to generate a new multi/interdisciplinary research environment at Lund University.

Objectives

Overall, the study’s objectives are projected to fill the stated gaps as follows:

• Spatiotemporal analysis of dust-storm sources, together with dust-source vulnerability mapping to identify new potential sources.
• Investigating the impact of climate change and conflicts, i.e., ISIS invasion, and water management, i.e., Iran and Turkey’s dam projects, on the frequency/intensity of dust-storms by investigating the spatiotemporal dust-storm dataset.
• Describing driving forces of dust-storm and identifying the external environmental and socio-political key factors.
• Providing strategies to control and/or decrease dust-storms in the region by analyzing social- political-economic and environmental impacts of possible solutions to achieve sustainability and resilience.

Publications

Boroughani, M., Hashemi, H., Hosseini, S.H., Pourhashemi, S. and Berndtsson, R.. (2019). "Desiccating Lake Urmia: a new dust source of regional importance". IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, 17(9): 1483-1487.

Boroughani, M., Pourhashemi, S., Hashemi, H., Salehi, M., Amirahmadi, A., Asadi, M.A.Z. and Berndtsson, R. (2020). "Application of remote sensing techniques and machine learning algorithms in dust source detection and dust source susceptibility mapping". Ecological Informatics, 56: 101059.

Naghibi, A., Hashemi, H., Zhao, P., Brogaard, S., Eklund, L., Hamid Hassan, H., and Mansourian, A. (2023) "Spatiotemporal variability of dust storm source susceptibility during wet and dry periods: The Tigris-Euphrates River Basin". Atmospheric Pollution Research, 15(1): 101953.

Research Activities

Interview with Sara Brogaard about dust-storms in Radio Sweden's program "Vetenskapsradion Klotet". Listen to the episode (in Swedish) here. Fast forward to 22:07 to listen to Sara's interview.