Reanalysis of marine-coastal indicators assessed by national and multinational organizations for the integrated coastal zone management

The progressive occupation of coastal zones led to consolidation of the Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) as a shared management process that aims to improve population life quality, to conserve biological diversity and coastal productivity. This ICZM view follows the premises of sustainable development, established in 1992 by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development - environmental conservation, economic growth and social equality. In this Conference, countries were invited to produce indicator systems, as a follow-up towards sustainable development. At world level, the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) prepared in 2006 a handbook of indicators to support the ICZM, titled A Handbook for Measuring the Progress and Outcomes of Integrated Coastal and Ocean Management (ICAM Handbook), incorporating socioeconomic, ecological and political dimensions as the base to analyzis. The present work reanalyzes marine-coastal areas indicators related to the ICZM, included by ten selected organizations in its official publications and websites about sustainability (or sustainable development). Seven sources are national: SayDS (Argentina), INE (Spain), INEGI (Mexico), DEFRA (United Kingdom), IBGE (Brazil), APA (Portugal) and Statistics Canada (Canada); and three, multinational - The GEO Project, REDESA and ILAC. The analysis has the list of ecological indicators suggested by the ICAM Handbook as a reference. The results showed that a few number of indicators are related to marine-coastal areas (less than 15%), giving the total number of indicators for each analyzed source. Most of the ecological indicators suggested by the ICAM Handbook are not considered by the selected organizations in its systems of sustainability indicators. The research aims to contribute to the improvement of the sustainability indicators systems, especially those maintained by the IBGE in Brazil, and to alert researchers and policy-makers to the importance of the natural environment as essential to the support of life, and to the conservation of biological diversity and productivity in marine-coastal areas.