Justice and Sustainability in the Territory Through Spatial Data Infrastructure Systems: a Network for Improving Local Decision-Making

The network JUST-SIDE - Justice and Sustainability in the Territory through Spatial Data Infrastructure Systems (SDIS) was built in January 2018 and is financed by CYTED-Programa Iberoamericano de Ciencia y Tecnología para el Desarrollo to run the next four years. It connects eight different Ibero-American countries and eleven partners, in the academia and the private sector, to promote territorial justice and sustainability of public policies. Aiming to contribute to the compliance of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, the network has been created to carry out legal analyses based on territorial, environmental and social geospatial data and to produce new information on social and environmental injustices. The main objective is to encourage the production of advanced cartography by overlapping layers of geographic, environmental and social information to identify territorial injustices and contribute for the adoption or correction of public policies. By developing and using a digital geospatial data infrastructure tool to support decision making and participation processes, JUST Side intends to promote and strengthen public policies and to address social, environmental, and economic, legal and democratic challenges. The geoprocessing of geospatial data using free GIS software and webGIS platforms and services will be used to develop a consistent methodology that, together with a legal analysis of environmental risks and socio-economic vulnerability can be applied throughout a series of case-studies in the different countries within the network. This paper will focus on the first exploratory case that will be selected to test the methodologic approach, the case of the Fridão dam, in the river Tâmega, in Portugal. Fridão is one of the largest hydroelectric projects to be built in Europe in the last 25 years and is one out of 10 large hydroelectric projects selected to be included in a National Dam Programme. The National Dam Programme was submitted to a strategic environmental impact assessment in 2007 and the individual project of the Fridão dam was submitted to an environmental impact assessment (EIA) in 2009. Although the EIA identified huge environmental impacts namely in affecting protected species, the project was considered legal and feasible on the basis of compensatory measures. In 2016, due to a strong political pressure and several complaints to the European Commission and the Courts, the Government suspended for three years the decision to build Fridão. In April 2019, the final decision will be taken by the Government. As such, the goal of this paper is to prepare a prospective study on the future territorial injustices around the reservoir of the dam and along the course of the river using the proposed geomatic tools. This is an exploratory case that allows a juridical analysis of territorial, environmental and social data from a geospatial visualization. The conclusion points to the critical value of these tools to prevent injustices at the local level and the enormous potential to serve as scientific basis for local public policies.