Mahsa Mapar | Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch (original) (raw)
Papers by Mahsa Mapar
Journal of Settlements and Spatial Planning, Dec 12, 2019
According to the roadmap designed by the European Commission (2011), it has become mandatory for ... more According to the roadmap designed by the European Commission (2011), it has become mandatory for the European countries to promote renewable sources to provide their required energy by 2050 (Babonneau et al., 2016; Read et al., 2016). The main goal for this switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, is to mitigate the release of CO2 into the atmosphere (Crotogino et al., 2010; Türkseven Doğrusoy and Serin, 2015; Reuß et al., 2017). However, the utilization of the renewable energy sources (RES) is Centre for Research on Settlements and Urbanism Journal of Settlements and Spatial Planning J o u r n a l h o m e p a g e: http://jssp.reviste.ubbcluj.ro One of the consequences of rapid global population growth is the increase in the energy demand. Currently, the main source of energy for various applications is fossil fuels, which are not renewable and their utilization at large scales have caused a number of environmental issues such as global warming. Hydrogen is one of the main renewable energy sources; however, its utilization has not yet been sufficiently commercialized due to some existing technical issues. For large-scale underground Hydrogen storage facilities, selecting the most suitable setup location is accounted to be a crucial factor in order to use Hydrogen as a promising and environmentally friendly energy carrier. This study aims to develop an expert judgment approach for the prioritization of criteria involving site selection of large-scale Hydrogen storage facilities to support development of modern cities and industries. In this regard, Fuzzy-Delphi methodology was used to prioritize the criteria and sub-criteria, which seemed to be most relevant for the underground Hydrogen storage site selection process. A comprehensive screening was performed in the literature and eighteen criteria from technical, economic, health, safety and environment (HST) and social points of view were extracted. A professional questionnaire was designed for the criteria prioritization and SPSS 25.0 was employed to analyse the achieved results. According to the gained results, the most important sub-criteria were identified as legal restrictions, reservoir permeability and porosity, and regional risks. Also, the findings demonstrated that HSE and technical issues of sustainability for the site selection of H2 underground storage were more underscored in comparison to economic and social criteria. It is concluded that more in-depth studies are still needed to cover more aspects of sustainability regarding site selection for underground gas storages with special focus on social dimensions.
Frontiers in Education, Sep 20, 2022
Frontiers in Education 01 frontiersin.org Moreno Pires et al. 10.3389/feduc.2022.639793 and struc... more Frontiers in Education 01 frontiersin.org Moreno Pires et al. 10.3389/feduc.2022.639793 and structure, and the learning outcomes and competencies students are expected to gain, (2) review the outcomes of its first pilot teaching in four European HEI, and (3) shed light on how this Module contributes to the development of competences and pedagogical approaches for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our findings show that 90% of the students were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with the Module, rating the Ecological Footprint as the most useful teaching tool among those included in the Module. In addition, they appreciated the interactive nature of the proposed teaching. Feedback obtained from students during the pilot teaching contributed to shaping the Module's final structure and content. The Module-an important interactive sustainability pedagogical tool-is now ready for use with students in different disciplines, thus contributing to progress toward the UN 2030 Agenda, particularly SDG 4, SDG 11, SDG 12, and SDG 13.
International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education
Purpose Distance universities are of great importance for establishing sustainability literacy, a... more Purpose Distance universities are of great importance for establishing sustainability literacy, as they operate as multipliers for thousands of students. However, despite several advantages of e-learning environments compared to traditional class-teaching, there are still challenges regarding suitable e-learning tools and didactical models. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of several e-learning tools on students’ knowledge and skills growth and to compare two learning paths, synchronous vs asynchronous, exploring how each affects the level of students’ knowledge achievement and skills acquisition. Design/methodology/approach The empirical analysis is based on an online course “Participatory processes in environmental politics”. International MSc and PhD students who enrolled in the course were from FernUniversität in Hagen (Germany) and Aberta University (Portugal). The course was designed as the flipped classroom, applying different e-learning tools and ac...
Iran Occupational Health, 2017
Background and aims: Planning to increase production and efficiency of human resources in product... more Background and aims: Planning to increase production and efficiency of human resources in productive organizations without estimating the economic costs imposed on the organization would cause ignorance of the actual value of safety in workplaces. From among financial costs of the productive organizations, the subject of safety promotion through decreasing the probable hazards are often in line with reluctance of employers and therefore they will try to decrease these mentioned costs. The object of this study was to determine the numerical value of safety from the perspective of the refinery staff through computing the amount of money, which the staffs tend to receive to tolerate unsafe conditions in the workplace. This amount will be equivalent to the importance of preventing accidents and promoting the safety condition in the workplace from the perspective of the labor force. Methods: In this study, by applying Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) and determining the amount of willin...
Health and Safety at Work, 2018
مقدمه: مسوولیت دست یابی به اهداف توسعه پایدار در بسیاری از کلا نشهرهای دنیا و به تبع آن کلا نشهر ... more مقدمه: مسوولیت دست یابی به اهداف توسعه پایدار در بسیاری از کلا نشهرهای دنیا و به تبع آن کلا نشهر تهران به شهردار یها واگذار گردیده است. از آن جایی که هدف بیش تر فعالی تهای دوست دار محی طزیست در بعد شهردار یها حفاظت از سلامت جسمی و روانی شهروندان است، ارزیابی پایداری سلامت عمل کرد شهرداری به یکی از مباحث نوین توسعه پایدار کلا نشهرها تبدیل شده است. لذا هدف از این مطالعه، طراحی ابزاری برای ارزیابی عمل کرد پایدار شهرداری تهران در حوزه فعالی تها و خدمات مرتبط با سلامت م یباشد. روش کار: در این پژوهش با تهیه ابزار مبتنی بر معیار، اقدام به استخراج و بوم یسازی معیارهای مرتبط با حوزه پایداری سلامت به صورت مطالعه موردی در شهرداری تهران گردید. جهت تعیین لیست اولیه معیارهای مؤثر، در ابتدا راهنماها و استانداردهای مرتبط با حوزه پایداری سلامت مورد بررسی قرار گرفت که منجر به استخراج لیست اولیه معیارها گردید. سپس با به کارگیری روش دلفی دو مرحل های و با همکاری گروه 12 نفره از خبرگان، اهمیت معیارهای استخراجی در طیف هفت مرحل ها ی لیکرت مورد سنجش قرار گرفت. معیار پذیرش، انحراف معیار کم تر از 1 و میانگین ...
Global Journal of Environmental Science and Management, 2015
Disasters are one of the most important challenges which must be considered by every management s... more Disasters are one of the most important challenges which must be considered by every management system. Higher education centers have high disaster risk because of their risk factors (existence of historical and scientific documents and resources and expensive laboratory equipment in these centers emphasizes the importance of disaster management). Moreover, the existence of young volunteers of human resources in universities urges the necessity of making these people familiar with disaster management rules and responses in emergency conditions. Creating appropriate tools for disaster management assessment makes it correct and precise in higher education systems using the presented conceptual model. The present model was planned so as to cover three phases which exist before, during, and after disaster. Studies were performed in one of the largest higher education centers in Tehran: Science and Research Branch of Islamic Azad University Campus. Results showed high-risk disasters in t...
Given the importance HEIs have in our society and considering the number of students, teaching st... more Given the importance HEIs have in our society and considering the number of students, teaching staff as well as administrative and management staff they host every day, it becomes fundamental to ensure that sustainability is not only taught but also practiced within campuses. This was the fundamental reason for building a strategic partnership across four European universities and one international Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) to set up the ERASMUS+ EUSTEPs project-Enhancing Universities' Sustainability Teaching and Practices through Ecological Footprint-in order to undertake both theoretical and practical activities to develop a new generation of sustainable citizens. With the inclusion of the Ecological Footprint (EF) concept and several educational tools and approaches, the project aims to educate students and the wider university community on the sustainability implications of personal behaviour, and to enhance new professional expertise in the society and in the future labour market. The role that Ecological Footprint can have in communicating the scale and significance of humanity's overuse of the planet's natural resources in simple and powerful terms, has long been acknowledged and this project thus intends to leverage on that and deliver on the following four key objectives: 1) to develop interactive teaching modules, materials and tools for the academic community to become Footprint ambassadors; 2) to build a Massive Open On-line Course made available through the project webplatform to scale-up project outcomes and enlarge the target audiences; 3) to involve all members of the university community in the co-development of an online, freely available University Footprint calculator about the environmental pressure of universities; and 4) to initiate a process of campuses greening, thus reducing their resource demand.
Sustainable Cities and Society, 2020
Abstract Sustainability assessment tools have provided a way for local authorities to assess thei... more Abstract Sustainability assessment tools have provided a way for local authorities to assess their performance towards sustainable development. However, a major problem of existing methods is the lack of an integrated assessment approach to cover significant aspects of municipalities’ activities, namely Health, Safety and Environment (HSE). This study was conducted to address the aggregation of these key municipal aspects by combining them into an integrated assessment index. Tehran municipalities are used as a case study. The Exploratory Factor Analysis method was applied to reduce the complexity of HSE indicators and build the index. The final results integrated a set of 62 indicators into 20 factors based on 6 HSE sustainability themes. In addition, the Sustainability Assessment Index (SAI) was formed by combining 6 sub-indices based on the HSE themes. Finally, the level of HSE sustainability performance in the municipality was divided into four levels, regarding their progress. The findings showed that the best HSE sustainability performance was performed on the Health-Environment intersection theme. Moreover, the majority of Tehran municipalities were classified in level 3 (moderate) on HSE sustainability performance, emerging the need of reviewing the plans and programs that are related to municipal sustainable development by considering district-centered HSE issues.
International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Safety, 2019
The level of contractor’s HSE is a major concern in outsourcing of the works for large organizati... more The level of contractor’s HSE is a major concern in outsourcing of the works for large organizations. In each tender a rational level of HSE holding by the contractors is recommended to reduce the project costs. By investigating the classification procedure of the contracts available in reliable manuals and models at international level, 6 main criteria were selected for determining the contract level from the viewpoint of HSE. Also, an indicator, called "contract separation" was proposed by weighting the criteria. Initial weight of the main criteria along with their scoring in this indicator was determined by applying sub-criteria characteristics, namely "specialized workforce", "man-day required for meeting the criteria", "required technology", and "impact of criterion on planning the next steps of the contract". Then, by preparing a questionnaire and applying the experts' opinion, the final weight of the criteria was specified...
Ecological Indicators, 2017
The sustainability assessment of public sector organizations including municipalities, with a foc... more The sustainability assessment of public sector organizations including municipalities, with a focus on the integration of health, safety, and environmental (HSE) issues in the context of sustainability performance indicators, has almost remained underexplored. Moreover, since a large number of the activities of megacities' municipalities have directly to do with HSE issues, there seems to be a substantial gap in the study of megacities and corresponding local public administrations. The present study is aimed at developing a performance evaluation tool, supported by indicators, to monitor the HSE aspects of sustainable development in the municipalities of megacities. To put the proposed tool into practice, a set of performance evaluation indicators is proposed to be adopted in Iranian municipalities, integrated in the megacity of Tehran. The selection process was conducted by employing Delphi technique. In doing so, a 2-round questionnaire was responded by qualified experts to select the most robust indicators of HSE performance and evaluate the priority of each indicator. A total of 80 indicators were generated and grouped into 13 categories, 29 sub-categories, and 7 themes-(Health (H), Safety (S), Environment (E), Health-Safety (HS), Health-Environment (HE), Safety-Environment (SE), and Health, Safety and Environment (HSE)). Findings indicate that amongst the overall average score of the 13 categories, "Fire and emergency response" is the most important category, closely followed by "Waste", "Transportation", and "Natural systems" categories. Moreover, among the 7 proposed themes, the integrated "HSE theme", nearly followed by "safety theme", plays the most significant role in enhancing the HSE performance of sustainability in Tehran municipalities. It is concluded that in the HSE context of the megacities municipalities under scrutiny, social aspects of sustainability gain more attention in comparison with the environmental ones. Furthermore, in municipalities of megacities, the indicators related to health and safety could be considered as 'key indicators' and should be thus classified into independent categories so that their roles can be highlighted in the management and assessment of municipal sustainable development.
Background and aims: Evaluation of the contractor's HSE is a key issue for the employer that infl... more Background and aims: Evaluation of the contractor's HSE is a key issue for the employer that influences the selection of a contractor. An appropriate method of assessment can play a significant role in the selection of qualified contractors. This paper presents a new method for ranking of contractor's HSE at pre-contract stage of a project. Methods: To develop this new evaluation method, the contracts were categorized in 3 groups of advanced, medium and preliminary. In order to pre-assess the contractors' status prior to their participation in bids, an HSE data questionnaire was developed in the frame of 40 questions. Then 29 indices were developed for primary HSE assessment based on International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (OGP). Because the role of each index is different in each category of contracts thus, seven elements of HSE model were weighted on the basis of contract category. Contractors scoring system was developed in each category of contract based on the obtained weights. Finally the contractors were categorized in four groups of A, B, C and D based on their scores obtained from their HSE evaluation. Results: The results revealed that each term of HSE have different weight in each contract category. In advanced (group 1) and medium (group 2) contracts, the leadership plus commitment (coefficient of 4.9 and 4.3 respectively) and in preliminary contracts the execution and monitoring (coefficient 3.3) have the highest weights. The Strategy and goals have the minimum weight in all 3 types of contracts (e.g. 4.4 in advanced, 3.6 in medium and 2.4 in preliminary contracts). The minimum score required for an A group contractor to get an advanced contract is 537 while the maximum score of a D group contractor to obtain a preliminary contract is 123. Conclusion: The new developed method is able to rank the HSE of contractors prior to sign the contract.
Disasters are one of the most important challenges which must be considered by every management s... more Disasters are one of the most important challenges which must be considered by every management system. Higher education centers have high disaster risk because of their risk factors (existence of historical and scientific documents and resources and expensive laboratory equipment in these centers emphasizes the importance of disaster management). Moreover, the existence of young volunteers of human resources in universities urges the
necessity of making these people familiar with disaster management rules and responses in emergency conditions.
Creating appropriate tools for disaster management assessment makes it correct and precise in higher education
systems using the presented conceptual model. The present model was planned so as to cover three phases which exist
before, during, and after disaster. Studies were performed in one of the largest higher education centers in Tehran:
Science and Research Branch of Islamic Azad University Campus. Results showed high-risk disasters in these centers
which must be taken into consideration continuously. The objective of this study was to create appropriate patterns of
disaster risk management in these centers.
Journal of Settlements and Spatial Planning, Dec 12, 2019
According to the roadmap designed by the European Commission (2011), it has become mandatory for ... more According to the roadmap designed by the European Commission (2011), it has become mandatory for the European countries to promote renewable sources to provide their required energy by 2050 (Babonneau et al., 2016; Read et al., 2016). The main goal for this switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, is to mitigate the release of CO2 into the atmosphere (Crotogino et al., 2010; Türkseven Doğrusoy and Serin, 2015; Reuß et al., 2017). However, the utilization of the renewable energy sources (RES) is Centre for Research on Settlements and Urbanism Journal of Settlements and Spatial Planning J o u r n a l h o m e p a g e: http://jssp.reviste.ubbcluj.ro One of the consequences of rapid global population growth is the increase in the energy demand. Currently, the main source of energy for various applications is fossil fuels, which are not renewable and their utilization at large scales have caused a number of environmental issues such as global warming. Hydrogen is one of the main renewable energy sources; however, its utilization has not yet been sufficiently commercialized due to some existing technical issues. For large-scale underground Hydrogen storage facilities, selecting the most suitable setup location is accounted to be a crucial factor in order to use Hydrogen as a promising and environmentally friendly energy carrier. This study aims to develop an expert judgment approach for the prioritization of criteria involving site selection of large-scale Hydrogen storage facilities to support development of modern cities and industries. In this regard, Fuzzy-Delphi methodology was used to prioritize the criteria and sub-criteria, which seemed to be most relevant for the underground Hydrogen storage site selection process. A comprehensive screening was performed in the literature and eighteen criteria from technical, economic, health, safety and environment (HST) and social points of view were extracted. A professional questionnaire was designed for the criteria prioritization and SPSS 25.0 was employed to analyse the achieved results. According to the gained results, the most important sub-criteria were identified as legal restrictions, reservoir permeability and porosity, and regional risks. Also, the findings demonstrated that HSE and technical issues of sustainability for the site selection of H2 underground storage were more underscored in comparison to economic and social criteria. It is concluded that more in-depth studies are still needed to cover more aspects of sustainability regarding site selection for underground gas storages with special focus on social dimensions.
Frontiers in Education, Sep 20, 2022
Frontiers in Education 01 frontiersin.org Moreno Pires et al. 10.3389/feduc.2022.639793 and struc... more Frontiers in Education 01 frontiersin.org Moreno Pires et al. 10.3389/feduc.2022.639793 and structure, and the learning outcomes and competencies students are expected to gain, (2) review the outcomes of its first pilot teaching in four European HEI, and (3) shed light on how this Module contributes to the development of competences and pedagogical approaches for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our findings show that 90% of the students were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with the Module, rating the Ecological Footprint as the most useful teaching tool among those included in the Module. In addition, they appreciated the interactive nature of the proposed teaching. Feedback obtained from students during the pilot teaching contributed to shaping the Module's final structure and content. The Module-an important interactive sustainability pedagogical tool-is now ready for use with students in different disciplines, thus contributing to progress toward the UN 2030 Agenda, particularly SDG 4, SDG 11, SDG 12, and SDG 13.
International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education
Purpose Distance universities are of great importance for establishing sustainability literacy, a... more Purpose Distance universities are of great importance for establishing sustainability literacy, as they operate as multipliers for thousands of students. However, despite several advantages of e-learning environments compared to traditional class-teaching, there are still challenges regarding suitable e-learning tools and didactical models. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of several e-learning tools on students’ knowledge and skills growth and to compare two learning paths, synchronous vs asynchronous, exploring how each affects the level of students’ knowledge achievement and skills acquisition. Design/methodology/approach The empirical analysis is based on an online course “Participatory processes in environmental politics”. International MSc and PhD students who enrolled in the course were from FernUniversität in Hagen (Germany) and Aberta University (Portugal). The course was designed as the flipped classroom, applying different e-learning tools and ac...
Iran Occupational Health, 2017
Background and aims: Planning to increase production and efficiency of human resources in product... more Background and aims: Planning to increase production and efficiency of human resources in productive organizations without estimating the economic costs imposed on the organization would cause ignorance of the actual value of safety in workplaces. From among financial costs of the productive organizations, the subject of safety promotion through decreasing the probable hazards are often in line with reluctance of employers and therefore they will try to decrease these mentioned costs. The object of this study was to determine the numerical value of safety from the perspective of the refinery staff through computing the amount of money, which the staffs tend to receive to tolerate unsafe conditions in the workplace. This amount will be equivalent to the importance of preventing accidents and promoting the safety condition in the workplace from the perspective of the labor force. Methods: In this study, by applying Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) and determining the amount of willin...
Health and Safety at Work, 2018
مقدمه: مسوولیت دست یابی به اهداف توسعه پایدار در بسیاری از کلا نشهرهای دنیا و به تبع آن کلا نشهر ... more مقدمه: مسوولیت دست یابی به اهداف توسعه پایدار در بسیاری از کلا نشهرهای دنیا و به تبع آن کلا نشهر تهران به شهردار یها واگذار گردیده است. از آن جایی که هدف بیش تر فعالی تهای دوست دار محی طزیست در بعد شهردار یها حفاظت از سلامت جسمی و روانی شهروندان است، ارزیابی پایداری سلامت عمل کرد شهرداری به یکی از مباحث نوین توسعه پایدار کلا نشهرها تبدیل شده است. لذا هدف از این مطالعه، طراحی ابزاری برای ارزیابی عمل کرد پایدار شهرداری تهران در حوزه فعالی تها و خدمات مرتبط با سلامت م یباشد. روش کار: در این پژوهش با تهیه ابزار مبتنی بر معیار، اقدام به استخراج و بوم یسازی معیارهای مرتبط با حوزه پایداری سلامت به صورت مطالعه موردی در شهرداری تهران گردید. جهت تعیین لیست اولیه معیارهای مؤثر، در ابتدا راهنماها و استانداردهای مرتبط با حوزه پایداری سلامت مورد بررسی قرار گرفت که منجر به استخراج لیست اولیه معیارها گردید. سپس با به کارگیری روش دلفی دو مرحل های و با همکاری گروه 12 نفره از خبرگان، اهمیت معیارهای استخراجی در طیف هفت مرحل ها ی لیکرت مورد سنجش قرار گرفت. معیار پذیرش، انحراف معیار کم تر از 1 و میانگین ...
Global Journal of Environmental Science and Management, 2015
Disasters are one of the most important challenges which must be considered by every management s... more Disasters are one of the most important challenges which must be considered by every management system. Higher education centers have high disaster risk because of their risk factors (existence of historical and scientific documents and resources and expensive laboratory equipment in these centers emphasizes the importance of disaster management). Moreover, the existence of young volunteers of human resources in universities urges the necessity of making these people familiar with disaster management rules and responses in emergency conditions. Creating appropriate tools for disaster management assessment makes it correct and precise in higher education systems using the presented conceptual model. The present model was planned so as to cover three phases which exist before, during, and after disaster. Studies were performed in one of the largest higher education centers in Tehran: Science and Research Branch of Islamic Azad University Campus. Results showed high-risk disasters in t...
Given the importance HEIs have in our society and considering the number of students, teaching st... more Given the importance HEIs have in our society and considering the number of students, teaching staff as well as administrative and management staff they host every day, it becomes fundamental to ensure that sustainability is not only taught but also practiced within campuses. This was the fundamental reason for building a strategic partnership across four European universities and one international Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) to set up the ERASMUS+ EUSTEPs project-Enhancing Universities' Sustainability Teaching and Practices through Ecological Footprint-in order to undertake both theoretical and practical activities to develop a new generation of sustainable citizens. With the inclusion of the Ecological Footprint (EF) concept and several educational tools and approaches, the project aims to educate students and the wider university community on the sustainability implications of personal behaviour, and to enhance new professional expertise in the society and in the future labour market. The role that Ecological Footprint can have in communicating the scale and significance of humanity's overuse of the planet's natural resources in simple and powerful terms, has long been acknowledged and this project thus intends to leverage on that and deliver on the following four key objectives: 1) to develop interactive teaching modules, materials and tools for the academic community to become Footprint ambassadors; 2) to build a Massive Open On-line Course made available through the project webplatform to scale-up project outcomes and enlarge the target audiences; 3) to involve all members of the university community in the co-development of an online, freely available University Footprint calculator about the environmental pressure of universities; and 4) to initiate a process of campuses greening, thus reducing their resource demand.
Sustainable Cities and Society, 2020
Abstract Sustainability assessment tools have provided a way for local authorities to assess thei... more Abstract Sustainability assessment tools have provided a way for local authorities to assess their performance towards sustainable development. However, a major problem of existing methods is the lack of an integrated assessment approach to cover significant aspects of municipalities’ activities, namely Health, Safety and Environment (HSE). This study was conducted to address the aggregation of these key municipal aspects by combining them into an integrated assessment index. Tehran municipalities are used as a case study. The Exploratory Factor Analysis method was applied to reduce the complexity of HSE indicators and build the index. The final results integrated a set of 62 indicators into 20 factors based on 6 HSE sustainability themes. In addition, the Sustainability Assessment Index (SAI) was formed by combining 6 sub-indices based on the HSE themes. Finally, the level of HSE sustainability performance in the municipality was divided into four levels, regarding their progress. The findings showed that the best HSE sustainability performance was performed on the Health-Environment intersection theme. Moreover, the majority of Tehran municipalities were classified in level 3 (moderate) on HSE sustainability performance, emerging the need of reviewing the plans and programs that are related to municipal sustainable development by considering district-centered HSE issues.
International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Safety, 2019
The level of contractor’s HSE is a major concern in outsourcing of the works for large organizati... more The level of contractor’s HSE is a major concern in outsourcing of the works for large organizations. In each tender a rational level of HSE holding by the contractors is recommended to reduce the project costs. By investigating the classification procedure of the contracts available in reliable manuals and models at international level, 6 main criteria were selected for determining the contract level from the viewpoint of HSE. Also, an indicator, called "contract separation" was proposed by weighting the criteria. Initial weight of the main criteria along with their scoring in this indicator was determined by applying sub-criteria characteristics, namely "specialized workforce", "man-day required for meeting the criteria", "required technology", and "impact of criterion on planning the next steps of the contract". Then, by preparing a questionnaire and applying the experts' opinion, the final weight of the criteria was specified...
Ecological Indicators, 2017
The sustainability assessment of public sector organizations including municipalities, with a foc... more The sustainability assessment of public sector organizations including municipalities, with a focus on the integration of health, safety, and environmental (HSE) issues in the context of sustainability performance indicators, has almost remained underexplored. Moreover, since a large number of the activities of megacities' municipalities have directly to do with HSE issues, there seems to be a substantial gap in the study of megacities and corresponding local public administrations. The present study is aimed at developing a performance evaluation tool, supported by indicators, to monitor the HSE aspects of sustainable development in the municipalities of megacities. To put the proposed tool into practice, a set of performance evaluation indicators is proposed to be adopted in Iranian municipalities, integrated in the megacity of Tehran. The selection process was conducted by employing Delphi technique. In doing so, a 2-round questionnaire was responded by qualified experts to select the most robust indicators of HSE performance and evaluate the priority of each indicator. A total of 80 indicators were generated and grouped into 13 categories, 29 sub-categories, and 7 themes-(Health (H), Safety (S), Environment (E), Health-Safety (HS), Health-Environment (HE), Safety-Environment (SE), and Health, Safety and Environment (HSE)). Findings indicate that amongst the overall average score of the 13 categories, "Fire and emergency response" is the most important category, closely followed by "Waste", "Transportation", and "Natural systems" categories. Moreover, among the 7 proposed themes, the integrated "HSE theme", nearly followed by "safety theme", plays the most significant role in enhancing the HSE performance of sustainability in Tehran municipalities. It is concluded that in the HSE context of the megacities municipalities under scrutiny, social aspects of sustainability gain more attention in comparison with the environmental ones. Furthermore, in municipalities of megacities, the indicators related to health and safety could be considered as 'key indicators' and should be thus classified into independent categories so that their roles can be highlighted in the management and assessment of municipal sustainable development.
Background and aims: Evaluation of the contractor's HSE is a key issue for the employer that infl... more Background and aims: Evaluation of the contractor's HSE is a key issue for the employer that influences the selection of a contractor. An appropriate method of assessment can play a significant role in the selection of qualified contractors. This paper presents a new method for ranking of contractor's HSE at pre-contract stage of a project. Methods: To develop this new evaluation method, the contracts were categorized in 3 groups of advanced, medium and preliminary. In order to pre-assess the contractors' status prior to their participation in bids, an HSE data questionnaire was developed in the frame of 40 questions. Then 29 indices were developed for primary HSE assessment based on International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (OGP). Because the role of each index is different in each category of contracts thus, seven elements of HSE model were weighted on the basis of contract category. Contractors scoring system was developed in each category of contract based on the obtained weights. Finally the contractors were categorized in four groups of A, B, C and D based on their scores obtained from their HSE evaluation. Results: The results revealed that each term of HSE have different weight in each contract category. In advanced (group 1) and medium (group 2) contracts, the leadership plus commitment (coefficient of 4.9 and 4.3 respectively) and in preliminary contracts the execution and monitoring (coefficient 3.3) have the highest weights. The Strategy and goals have the minimum weight in all 3 types of contracts (e.g. 4.4 in advanced, 3.6 in medium and 2.4 in preliminary contracts). The minimum score required for an A group contractor to get an advanced contract is 537 while the maximum score of a D group contractor to obtain a preliminary contract is 123. Conclusion: The new developed method is able to rank the HSE of contractors prior to sign the contract.
Disasters are one of the most important challenges which must be considered by every management s... more Disasters are one of the most important challenges which must be considered by every management system. Higher education centers have high disaster risk because of their risk factors (existence of historical and scientific documents and resources and expensive laboratory equipment in these centers emphasizes the importance of disaster management). Moreover, the existence of young volunteers of human resources in universities urges the
necessity of making these people familiar with disaster management rules and responses in emergency conditions.
Creating appropriate tools for disaster management assessment makes it correct and precise in higher education
systems using the presented conceptual model. The present model was planned so as to cover three phases which exist
before, during, and after disaster. Studies were performed in one of the largest higher education centers in Tehran:
Science and Research Branch of Islamic Azad University Campus. Results showed high-risk disasters in these centers
which must be taken into consideration continuously. The objective of this study was to create appropriate patterns of
disaster risk management in these centers.