Avaliação do licenciamento ambiental em Minas Gerais e do seu papel no desenvolvimento sustentável

Abstract

Environmental impact assessment was developed based on the industrial development, as well as on major environmental disasters, thus being seen as a useful tool for analyzing environmental feasibility of large constructions. Environmental impact assessment was incorporated into the legal framework in 1970 with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and in Brazil with the enactment of the National Environmental Policy (PNMA) in 1981. Another instrument from the PNMA that gained visibility was the environmental licensing, which became the main national mechanism for evaluating consolidation impacts. Both instruments set up to reconcile development and sustainability. The objective of this study was to evaluate the history of environmental impact assessment and environmental licensing, especially in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The methodology used was based on analyzing the environmental licensing processes of mining activities in the jurisdiction of the Regional Environmental Regularization of Alto San Francisco (SUPRAM ASF) by means of legal and technical verifiers organized in Principle, Criteria, Indicators and Verifiers, which were organized and analyzed by the Analytic Hierarchy Process, where each tester received a value. With this methodology, it was possible to assess the Effective Contribution Index (ICE) of environmental licensing for sustainable development in the study area. The results show that environmental licensing contribution to sustainable development is still low and countervailing measures and mitigation of impacts from the operation of potentially polluting activities are no longer charged by executive bodies, which brings imbalance to the sustainability tripod. Numerically, this paper showed that the Effective Contribution Index (ICE) of environmental licensing for sustainable development is below 50%.