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Atlas of Sustainability Indicators |
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Why Analyze Sustainability Indicators in Coastal Municipalities?
With an increasing concern about the healthy development of societies in harmony
with environment, man started organizing and making efforts at creating mechanisms
to monitor and control processes
induced by anthropic activities in the coastal zone (CZ).
Knowledge of coastal ecology and dynamics became reference information for taking
public decisions aiming at sustainable growth and expansion of societies.
In this context appears the Integrated Coastal Zone Management, as a Science
with the objective of recognizing the coast and its characteristics, understanding
its evolution and elaborating mechanisms of quality control of the CZ, guaranteeing
quality of life to the population living in these zones.
One of the instruments used to raise the CZ condition is the Parametric Statistics,
where the CZ characteristics and forces acting on it are represented by parameters.
Having the parameters, the indicators are conceived and used to supply information
about the complex organizations. The parameters' degree of importance is distinguished
through the attribution of weights to the obtained measures, resulting
in the values of each indicator's index.
The studies on sustainability indicators have demonstrated that their choice is
due to the recognition of the main forces acting as a pressure on the ecosystem and,
thus, sets of indicators vary from region to region. However,
indicators share characteristics in common, being the clarity in transmission
of information the most notorious of them.
So, as a final product, the present work provides the results of the analysis of
forty (40) sustainability indicators, based on official data related to the
thirty-four (34) coastal municipalities, inside the six (6) dimensions of
Sustainable Development proposed by Ignacy Sachs:
space, cultural, economic, ecological, social and political.
Anthropic impact polygons have been calculated to each municipality,
where the influence of each analyzed dimension is represented.
The maps related to dimensions and indicators supply, yet, a space
representation of the inequalities found in the State of Rio de Janeiro.
The research focus is to collaborate with a better understanding of the State's
socio-environmental dynamics, constituting necessary report to
informative support for the formulation of public policies that are adequate to the
natural resources' management and to the guarantee of quality of
life of the State's population.