La evaluación ambiental de planes de ordenación del territorio y urbanismo de La Rioja

Abstract

The requirement in European Law for programs, plans and projects to be subject to environmental evaluation has been adopted later than scheduled by the Spanish legal system. In La Rioja, some preexisting previsions concerning only urban and territory organisation were partly developed. Certainly, the integration of sustainable development’s demands for urban areas planning represents difficulties of a level which Riojan regulations can only help to solve to a certain extent. In the present work, it is shown that this regulation only concerns formal requirements. Due to the lack of clear parameters to evaluate, the Riojan Administration has been following an arguable pattern of action that should be reconsidered in view of the criteria of territorial sustainability to be found in the recently appeared Law of Land