Licensing sustainability related aspects in Strategic Environmental Assessment. Evidence from Romania’s urban areas

Urban areas represent the central point of sustainability initiatives which drive significant changes in cities’ planning, design and management. Given that urban areas are subject to continuous change, efficient and integrated planning and policy strategies are needed to address their complex challenges. This is why the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) plays an essential role in urban planning considering the optimal investment alternatives along with the environmental protection measures. Given that the SEA process considers all impacts on social, economic, institutional and environmental factors, this process must be managed as an adaptive process. Our analysis proposes an evaluation protocol to address sustainability on its economic-environmental-social-institutional dimensions in the evaluation of environmental permits. The evaluation protocol comprised 43 items grouped into three categories (“general presentation”, “sustainability related aspects within the protection measures” and “the strength of the protection measures”). Our analysis, focused on the urban areas from Romania as case study, shows that the environmental permits address sustainability slightly below average. The environmental and institutional dimensions of sustainability achieved the highest scores while those of the economic and social dimensions were quite the opposite. This proved to be helpful in recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of such regulatory documents in terms of their environmental, social, economic and institutional sustainability. Our study contributes to the international literature given that no studies have been elaborated on the evaluation of environmental permits using an evaluation protocol.