Contribuições da geografia para avaliação de impactos ambientais em áreas urbanas, com o emprego da metodologia pressão - Estado Impacto - Resposta (P.E.I.R.)

Most part of the world population live in a urban environment, although with the lack of organization, several cities in the world have environmental problems, specially in the Latin America and Caribbean countries where the fast urbanization is the mainly cause of the pressure and its impacts in those cities. Based upon the diagnosis of an aggravation of environmental quality in the cities, many methodologies have been developed in a way to contribute to the environmental management, among then the PSIR matrix (pressure-state-impact-response) designed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) has been using in the GEO Cities Project. The geographic point of view of the city has a lot to offer to the optimization of the results of such methodology. This argument is plausible because geographical studies, consider the broad aspects of the space in which human societies develop their ever changing activities through time. The aim of this paper is to show how the geographer, with the analysis of man's interaction with the environment, can contribute to studies by the PSIR matrix.