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Abstract: Due to the urbanization and economic growth, planning of regional sustainable development has become one of the major challenges in the world. The key indicators such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), electricity and energy consumption and Greenhouse Gas Emission (GHG) are considered in sustainable development planning. This paper determines number of required workforce in different sectors of each province in Iran considering targets/goals for sustainable development indicators in the 2030 macroeconomic and regional planning. First, the relative goals are designed for GDP, electricity, energy and GHG emission and then, two Weighted Goal Programming (WGP) models are applied to allocate the optimal workforce among four sectors: agriculture, industry, services and transportation. The first model minimizes recruitment of new workforce and allows current workforce exchange among the four sectors in each province in order to achieve the goals, while the second model indicates equitable distribution of new workforce recruitment in different sectors within each province. In both models, the workforce changes have been investigated based on achieving the desirable growth rates of GDP, GHG, electricity and energy consumption as planned by the government. Based on the results of this paper, policy makers can manage workforce and the government can make optimised decisions to macroeconomic and regional planning

1. Introduction Sustainable Development (SD) is considered as a fundamental, vital and central debate in twenty-first century. Nowadays, it is an important topic in the conferences, research institutes and international organizations. SD can be defined as management of relationships among human systems and ecosystems in order to use of resources and facilities efficiently and to provide welfare for current and future generations (San Cristóbal, 2012). The concept of SD is not only referring environmental issues but also includes general concept of politics, economy, culture, society and so on. Indeed, the SD addresses three issues: economic development, social development and environmental protection. One of the most important steps in assessing sustainability is the selection of suitable development’s indicators to consider interaction among economic, society and environment. In recent years, several indicators have been proposed for measurement of SD. In 1992, United Nation introduced SD indicators in Agenda 21 report. Numerous organizations have evaluated the SD and proposed some indicators such as World Bank, World Resource, World watch Institute United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, International Atomic Energy Agency, European Union, Eurostat, European Environment Agency, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Energy Agency (Bolcárová and Kološta, 2015). In this section, three issues related to definition of SD including economic, social and environmental are explained.