A sustainability analysis of environmental management approaches: Prevention, mitigation and compensation

The scientific literature has taken Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) as a promoter of sustainable development only in a normative way, hampering the comprehension of the instrument’s potentialities and weaknesses. Therefore, it is necessary to insert the debate about EIA effectiveness in a framework that conceptualizes sustainability more clearly. This framework can be raised by economic theory, which is based on the capitals substitution approach. The present paper analyzes how EIA’s main forms of environmental impact treatment can induce sustainability in the relationship between productive processes and environmental systems, taking into account capitals substitution ideas. The paper is based on an analysis model built in systemic precepts. It was possible to observe that economic projects’ environmental aspects can be classified into four major groups concerning capital substitution: extraction, edification, creation of cultivated natural capital and injection of energy/matter into the environment. It was also observable that EIA’s preventive means avoid capitals substitution and induce strong sustainability, whilst mitigation means avoiding capitals substitution only partially, which makes less effective in inducing sustainability and, finally, compensation means legitimate capitals substitution, inducing weak sustainability. The most effective forms of environmental impact treatment are those less applied in the brazilian context, meanwhile the less effective are those mostly applied. In this sense, the EIA practice in Brazil does not induce economic productive processes to the path of global environmental system’s sustainability.