Environmental Impact Assessment and the design of green infrastructures

Abstract

It is widely known that land use planning should be done taking environmental aspects into account, role that the Environmental Impact Assessment has played in different forms in many countries. At the same time, the debate about applying green infrastructure as a promoter of urban resilience has grown. Brazil presents, among the existing planning tools, a range of plans designed under the environmental perspective, which cover regional territories (eg. Ecologic-economic zoning), such as states or groups of municipalities. Meanwhile, there is the Municipal Master Plan, the main planning tool, built under the urban perspective, responsible for giving guidelines for municipal development, as well as for land use and occupation. However, the application of impact assessment in this regard is still not regulated, nor even widely organized in this country. The present proposal intends to identify how Environmental Impact Assessment, in terms of procedures and methods seen in theory and in practice, taking the Dutch experience as case study, can help in the integration of the different plans, aiming at proposing and designing green infrastructures as connectors of the urban and the rural. In this sense, the main goal of this project is to propose a basic framework organized from procedures and methods of impact assessment that allow the integration of regional plans of environmental character to the elaboration of the municipal master plan, having by core idea the design of green infrastructures. The discussion on possibilities of how to promote the implementation of this green infrastructure based on the application of urban and environmental policy instruments will also permeate the work. (AU)