Abstract
Fragility of the natural environment can be understood as susceptibility to damage and should be evaluated when it is to be applied to environmental land planning. Therefore the Integrated Environmental Assessment (IEA) aims to assess synergistic and cumulative effects resulting from environmental impacts caused by the set of hydroelectric developments. The present study applied the assessment method for vulnerable environments considering changes caused to the environment and society, due to the possible installation of five small hydroelectric projects (SHPs) in cascade in the Pardo River Basin, RS. With the help of the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) the algebra method of maps was used to analyze the environment as a whole and the study area was divided into three environments: physical (remnant vegetation and soil resistance variables), biotic (Phytosociological vegetation and Biodiversity variables) and anthropic (soil use and HDI variables) in order to have a perspective of different scenarios covering the entire environment. Hence, the results show that in all final maps of fragilities for the of the physical, anthropic and biotic environments the sites chosen to construct the five hydroelectric plants present a classification of between medium and high fragility
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