Environmental Planning is the essential instrument for the integration of the variables of the environmental dimension in actions for development, seeking to harmonize the environmental supply with the demand for sustainable development, through an appropriate ordering of the occupation of the territory based on the identification and assignment of areas of specialization and productive complementarity.

Environmental planning should be understood as the planning of the territory that introduces the environmental dimension in its conceptualization, differentiating itself from the economic conceptualization that considers territorial planning in economic terms, without taking into account the social cost and the environmental impact that this means, ignoring the social reality and the sense of use of nature within the criteria of sustainable use.

Also differentiating itself from the protectionist conceptualization, which proposes the protection of the environment as its exclusive purpose, forgetting the social context and the economic value of natural resources, as well as the need to use them to achieve common well-being.

The environmental planning of the territory must be understood as a planned process of a political, technical and administrative nature that proposes the analysis of a specific socio-spatial system (environmental system), leading to organizing and managing the use and occupation of that space, in accordance with the natural conditions and natural resources, the social dynamics, the productive structure, human settlements and the service infrastructure, to foresee the effects that socioeconomic activities cause in that spatial reality and establish the actions to be implemented with a view to meeting the well-being objectives. social, adequate management of natural reserves") and quality of life, that is, with a view to sustainable development.

Environmental planning for its operation and implementation requires inextricably related instruments, such as legal provisions, institutional organization and planning and development plans.

To this end, ecological-economic zoning constitutes an indispensable support for the development of planning plans; since, it provides the geographical location and quantification of areas with their own physical, biological and socioeconomic characteristics, distinguishable among them, due to their potential of natural resources and their capacity to support environmental impacts; providing the necessary information to solve complex problems related to the generation of goods and services, conservation of ecological processes and improvement of the quality of life of the population.