TEHRAN – Iran and Austria are working on 17 joint environmental projects worth €400,000, seven of which have so far been completed, ISNA reported on Wednesday.

Out of 17 joint projects between Iran and Austria, seven projects are almost completed and nine other projects were delayed due to the conditions caused by the coronavirus pandemic, which are expected to be completed by 2022, Azizollah Habibi, Iran’s Kharazmi University chancellor, said.

Estimating the financial capacity of the projects at €400,000 and said that “half of this budget, amounting to €200,000, is the share of support from Austria and the other half will be paid by Iran.

Pointing out that the focus of all of the projects is to meet the needs of society, he added that issues that people are dealing with daily such as the environment, water, renewable energy, sustainable development, etc.

Iran’s significant contribution to world’s scientific growth

The share of Iranian articles with international participation has had significant growth of 209 percent during an eight-year period (2013-2020), becoming the Islamic world’s leading country in science diplomacy, according to the Scopus International Citation Database.

The number of articles indexed by the Iranian researchers on the Web of Science website in 2020 increased by 122 percent compared to that of 2013, which made Iran 16th in the world with 69,779 articles, and first among the Islamic countries for several consecutive years, Gholam Hossein Rahimi, deputy minister of science has said.

In November 2020, scientific studies and analyses extracted from the Scopus International Citation Database showed that the rate of scientific contributions of Iranian researchers to the world increased from 17 percent in 2011 to 31 percent in 2020, becoming the world’s leading country in science diplomacy with 14 percent growth.

The development of international scientific partnerships and diplomacy is one of the main policies of Iran, which is also emphasized by the country’s higher education system, Mohammad Javad Dehghani, head of the Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC), said.

One of the most important indicators of scientific participation is the share of the latest joint international scientific findings in the total scientific publications of the country, he added.

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