Building sustainability in marine-coastal ecosystems: an analysis of social-ecological resilience indicators and criteria of planning instruments in the Northern Coast of São Paulo state (Brazil)

Abstract

The development and implementing of conservation and management policies and planning tools have been recommended worldwide in order to promote social-ecological resilience in marine-coastal ecosystem: creation of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and the establishment of the Marine Ecological-Economic Zoning of Coastal Management (ZEEM/GERCO) or the Marine Spatial Planning (MSP). There is considerable concern regarding the efficiency of these tools considering how they are developed, implemented, integrated. The hypothesis is that frequently the attributes and criteria that define management do not stem from data that consider goods and ecosystem services and local practices. Instead, they are established based on few scientific knowledge, enabling decisions to be influenced by political-economic interests, ignoring enhanced attributes and criteria. The Araçá Bay (São Sebastião-SP) was chosen in order to test the hypothesis, because at the same time it assembles essential social-ecological attributes for goods and services maintenance, it is been strongly threatened by the expansion of port activities, beside oil and gas production. The Araçá Bay is included into the Marine Protected Area of Northern Coast (APAMLN) and where Project Biota Araçá-FAPESP has been producing detailed scientific data since 2012. This research aims to analyze the use of scientific and ethnoecological data during the historical and recent process of marine-coastal planning of two management policies in the Northern Coast of São Paulo (ZEEM/GERCO-LN e APAMLN), with comprehensive focus on Araçá Bay. As result, we expect to have a framework of indicators of social-ecological resilience in marine-coastal environments based on the ecosystem goods and services surveyed by the Project Biota Araçá-FAPESP and based on criteria and attributes of marine-coastal planning and management emerged in local knowledge, as well as those found in management policies and those reported by the international literature, thus, providing data and guidelines for Sustainable Local Development Plan of Araçá Bay (SLDP). To test hypothesis we will conduct: (1) a broad bibliographical research regarding criteria and attributes of marine-coastal spatial planning and indicators of social-ecological resilience; (2) a historical and documental analyses of laws that affect of marine-coastal spatial planning policies at the study area (ZEEM/GERCO-LN and APAMLN) and semi-structured interviews with representative councils and past representatives of GERCO-LN and APAMLN, as well as, the monitoring of these meeting; (3) a local knowledge survey (ethnoecological) through semi-structured interviews with Araçá Bay users, in order to investigate local practices and social mechanisms that support the social-ecological resilience in this territory, to check the correspondence of the local knowledge with the criteria and attributes historically adopted by marine-coastal planning policies, to check the correspondence of marine-coastal planning indicators found in the literature and in the local knowledge with the outputs of the Project BIOTA Araçá-FAPESP, as well as to promote an approaching of formal science and ethnoscience, seeking to fill the gap of scientific information in the years before the beginning of the Project Biota Araçá-FAPESP; (4) systematization of indicators of ecosystem goods and services identified by the Project Biota Araçá-FAPESP, as well as the criteria and attributes found in local knowledge, policies and literature, in a framework of attributes to be considered in designing of the SLDP of Araçá Bay and in the management of other coastal bays and Marine Protected Areas in Brazil and worldwide. (AU)