How a 50-year-old forest beside the Bisotoun World Heritage site is deliberately run down, logged and primed for real-estate speculation — exposing a deeper crisis of governance.
The 112-hectare Bisotoun Forest Park is a planted woodland located in Kermanshah Province in southwestern Iran, lying beside the World Heritage inscription at Bisotoun, an Achaemenid rock relief and cuneiform text carved into the mountainside.
The Bisotoun forest park is now in the grip of a multi-layered crisis. According to Shargh newspaper, this 50-year-old woodland, made up largely of Eldar pine, has been exposed to wood-boring pests because of old age and neglect—especially insufficient irrigation by the former concessionaire. Parts of the forest have already dried out. At the same time, illegal logging by profiteers and people with addiction has dramatically deepened the environmental disaster.
While natural-resources officials stress the need to cut infected trees and replace them with native species, environmental activists denounce the slow pace of remedial work and voice deep concern that, once management is handed to the municipality, the land will be rezoned and carved up. The scene is one of collision: managerial negligence, ecological crisis, and predatory interests.
The Bisotoun forest park, with its fifty-year history and roughly 112 hectares of land, is not only a valuable ecosystem of some 170,000 trees; it is also an inseparable part of the cultural landscape of the Bisotoun World Heritage site. This artificial forest, grown in the shadow of the Achaemenid bas-relief, plays vital roles in moderating the microclimate, preserving soil, providing habitat for wildlife, and completing visitors’ visual experience of this human heritage.
Yet this natural and cultural asset now stands on the brink of destruction. A lethal combination of tree senescence, pest infestation, mismanagement, inadequate irrigation, and illegal logging has already dried and destroyed up to 15 percent of its green mass. This is not only an environmental catastrophe; it is a direct threat to the integrity of the landscape around a UNESCO-listed site. Its survival depends on urgent action: rehabilitation and replacement with native, resilient species.
Negligence, lawsuits, and the handover to the municipality
Environmental activists in Bisotoun county told Shargh:
“If the trees in this beautiful and valuable forest are infested, why is no serious pest control being done? It seems the Natural Resources Department has abandoned the place. Some profiteers are deliberately cutting trees in parts of the forest as if they want a full clear-cut. In some cases the bark has been stripped off. Altogether, maybe 300 to 500 trees have been cut or damaged so far.”
Abdol-Ali Jalilian, head of forestry and afforestation at the provincial Natural Resources Department, says:
“Based on satellite-image assessments, there are 170,000 trees in this forest park. Five percent of them are severely infested and need to be cut in a sanitary operation.”
Activists demand that the provincial Natural Resources Department intervene immediately, stop leaving pest-stricken trees unattended, launch urgent treatment and restoration measures, and, where necessary, cut irrecoverable trees and replace them with native, climate-adapted species.
Jalilian, who heads the Natural Resources office in Kermanshah, explains that the 10-year contract with Kermanshah Tourism Development Company for managing the forest park, signed in 2016, had technically been in the process of cancellation, but due to the company’s state-owned status and interference by the governor’s office, it was extended for another year and then, citing Covid-19 and other issues, allowed to run to the end of the full 10-year term.
The contract has now expired, and Natural Resources has filed suit against the company to obtain damages for the dried trees, illegal logging, and damage to the irrigation network. Once court-appointed experts calculate the losses, the company’s structures and assets will be seized in favor of the state, and if necessary, additional sums will be taken from the company’s accounts to fund restoration works.
Meanwhile, under the Seventh Development Plan, Iran’s current five-year national development programme, forest parks located within city boundaries must be handed over to municipalities. The Bisotoun municipality has thus been asked to submit a management plan, which it has done, but the plan still requires revisions. Natural Resources will soon take the park back from the Tourism Development Company and, once the plan is corrected, will transfer it to Bisotoun municipality.
In any efficient system, a national asset would never be left for nearly a decade in the grip of a failed operator who actively deepens the damage. Years of delay in terminating the contract with the tourism company—justified with bureaucratic pretexts such as the firm’s state-owned status, provincial interference, and the pandemic—expose a management structure unable or unwilling to move swiftly to protect public assets. The result of this procrastination is dried trees and ruined infrastructure. Now that the irreparable damage is done, the whole affair has been reduced to a long, complex lawsuit over financial compensation.
Step-by-step looting: from killing the trees to selling building rights
Many environmental activists and local campaigners fear that transferring the Bisotoun forest park to the municipality will open the door to corrupt investors, further tree-cutting, and eventual rezoning of the park into commercial complexes or parking lots—paved, in effect, through the sale of extra building density. Tellingly, the head of the Kermanshah Natural Resources office calls these concerns “legitimate.”
This pattern has all the hallmarks of a systematic, organized plunder of national assets. State bodies not only fail to block the looting; through delay, deliberate inefficiency, and transfers to unsuitable institutions, they create the legal and administrative ground for it. Entrusting the forest to an incompetent company—and then repeatedly renewing its contract despite glaring violations—is no longer a “mistake”; it is a form of indirect complicity.
The plunder typically unfolds in several calculated stages. First, through deliberate neglect (cutting off irrigation, failing to combat pests), trees are pushed toward death. Then the dried and diseased trees are cut under the pretext of sanitary operations—or quietly felled by profiteers—so that their timber can be sold. Finally, when the forest has been stripped of its trees and reduced to seemingly “worthless” land, the ground is prepared for rezoning and real-estate speculation on what was once a forest park.
Selling higher building densities and erecting commercial complexes is the ultimate reward of this looting. This is not a “crisis”; it is a mafia-style economic strategy executed on the body of national resources.
Beyond a local environmental disaster
The issue goes far beyond a handful of trees or even a single forest. The Bisotoun case is a civilizational question, because this crisis is more than a local environmental tragedy; it is a symbol of the breakdown of the organic link between governance, historical identity, and responsibility toward the future. The deliberate and incidental destruction of a forest that stands in the shadow of the Bisotoun inscription shows a society unable to maintain the connection between its inherited past and its natural assets for future generations.
This situation lays bare a management system in the Islamic Republic trapped in bureaucratic delay, devoid of accountability, and dominated by short-term profiteering.
The destruction of this forest is therefore not just an environmental failure. It is a mirror of a broader crisis in which public trust has eroded, responsibility has been replaced by blame-shifting, and collective memory is being worn away—precisely the elements that form the foundations of any living, dynamic civilization.
