Final Report: Environmental Protection Program. EAE del PNOT República Dominicana

The Ley 1-12, Estrategia Nacional de Desarrollo, establishes sustainability and adequate risk management as transversal policies to be incorporated in all public plans, programs, and projects. The Constitution of 2010 prioritizes the formulation and execution of a national territorial order plan to ensure the efficient and sustainable use of natural resources, in accordance with the need for climate change adaptation. The Plan Nacional de Ordenamiento Territorial (PNOT) will be the result of a process coordinated by the Dirección General de Ordenamiento y Desarrollo Territorial (DGODT) of the Ministry of Economy, Planning and Development (MEPyD), to establish the guiding policy for the actions of the Dominican State in the national territory, facilitating intersectoral coordination for territorial management, and serving as a reference framework for regional and local planning. The PNOT will define the different categories of zoning that will guide regional and local planning, with an indicative character for the private sector and a binding character for public entities. The methodology of the EAE del PNOT was based on the selection, prioritization, and analysis of critical environmental topics of a technical and systemic nature that defined the scope of the EAE, due to the priority attributed to them to define the state of the environment in the Dominican Republic. The impact of the PNOT will be verified through the indicators that were consensuated for this purpose, to measure the evolution of (a) the conservation of ecosystems and biodiversity (terrestrial and marine-coastal); (b) the conservation of soil, water, and forest resources; and (c) the conservation of environmental quality. The analyses of the EAE del PNOT show that the activities developed in the territory, particularly infrastructure services, mining, tourism, and agriculture, have a negative impact of medium to high significance on the three priority critical topics. They also show that if environmental-territorial management improves, articulated with risk management and climate change management, there will be an improvement in all aspects of sustainable development in the Dominican Republic (institutional, social, economic, and environmental), which would be a significant contribution to overcoming two of the 10 major restrictions that hinder sustainable development in the Dominican Republic, according to the base document of the END: the lack of quality of state management, and the absence of territorial and environmental order.