Potencialidades e desafios ao desenvolvimento de um município: a construção de um indicador de sustentabilidade para São Lourenço do Sul

Abstract

The municipal director plan of the São Lourenço do Sul was created in an integrated way, considering the main monitoring and development programs of the municipality. Based on this, the project had the aim to create an indicator of sustainability in the Integrated Sustainable Development Plan and Agenda 21 of the São Lourenço do Sul, to generate an assessment and progression tool for the dissemination and progress of the municipality towards sustainable development. Thus, a quantitative and descriptive approach was carried out through the application of the multicriteria decision support methodology which allowed to interpret the same and create an evaluation tool that considered as local peculiarities. As a result, the municipal priorities for the areas of economic, social and environmental interest were identified; evaluation of a criteria was created; 18 descriptors were evaluated locally and globally; the data available on the municipality were analyzed and the municipal sustainability index was generated. Aspects that gained prominence with these analyzes were the scarce availability of data about the municipality, the great temporal variation between the data and the low credibility of some information. Regarding the result of the indicator, São Lourenço do Sul obtained as a result 37.82% of progress toward the sustainability of its development. All areas of interest presented low contributions; however, the area of environmental interest was the one that most positively contributed to this result, while the area of social interest was the one that contributed positively to this result. The evaluation criteria that presented the best performance were education, conservation and agriculture. In contrast, the criteria with the lowest results were public services for rural areas, tourism and health.