Território e solidariedade: elementos para uma avaliação de equidade ambiental de projetos de desenvolvimento

Abstract

The social metabolism of capital is structurally incompatible with the search for a socio-ecological planning sustainable and democratic. However, public and private actions continue to be directed towards large projects that are spoken of sustainable development. Accordingly, in the last eight years, Brazil has gone through a period called by some as neodesenvolvimentista, by the diversity of projects urban or rural infrastructural character. With regard to water infrastructure, especially for agriculture, the state of Ceará, has become an expression of this period. Among the northeastern states, which is the largest number of irrigation projects implemented, fourteen in total, for the fruit for export, being an example, the Irrigated Perimeter of Tabuleiro de Russas. Although such projects diffuse in their impact technical studies, the impression that negative externalities or positive affect indiscriminately the different social actors involved in them, the environmental justice has become a demand increasingly present on the agenda of those social actors. Farmers, for example, by their socioeconomic vulnerable bear disproportionately to the risks and uncertainties arising from the physical and socio-cultural impacts that such projects bring in their traditional territories.Thus, given the limitations that Environmental Impact Assessments have shown regarding the understanding of environmental equity principle, this work has as main objective to analyze, from this principle, the impact of Irrigation Project Tabuleiro de Russas on the rural community of Lagoa dos Cavalos. Therefore, it sought to construct a sequencemethodological for benchmarking Environmental Equity Index, according to the methodology of indicators of pressure, state, impact and response - PEIR, proposed by the United Nations Environment Programme - UNEP. The low level of equity measured at the end of the case study corroborated the above theoretical considerations and the tendency to underestimate the environmental principle of fairness on the part of major development projects.