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One of the greatest challenges
that rapidly developing cities are facing is that of preserving their
environment, natural resources and improving their economic growth rate
finding at the same time the least costly way to reduce the negative
impact on the environment.
In spite of the fact that
the traditional and more direct approach for environmental management is
based on the imposition of restrictions, penalties and sanctions derived
from express regulations, which are difficult and costly methods to
implement and enforce, especially when the institutional capacity is
undergoing a strengthening process, our experience is teaching us that the
use of participation instruments can change behaviours more rapidly. They
are capable of turning into incentives as they promote, through the
awareness of the stakeholders involved, powerful motivations based on the
medium and long-term costs and benefits derived from being protagonist in
the improvement of the environmental quality and life quality of the
population.
The present study has been
developed around these concepts and its results in spite of being
preliminary ones have allowed for the first time to identify the critical
sources of emission of pollutants to the city’s atmosphere, their
composition terms of gases and noise, to detect the importance and
magnitude of the resulting impact, to produce an inventory of the origins
and causes susceptible to adequate management and to formulate regulations
that promote a broad participation of production and consumer citizens.
The results obtained
exceeded the objectives set as the inter-sectoral participation enabled
the treatment of the problem from an holistic approach, considering the
development of a series of diagnostic instruments involving the use of
geographical information techniques in the processing of industrial and
commercial information, the use of environmental and population health
indicators as well as the use of specific modelling techniques for impact
assessment.
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