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About Ecologists and social scientists are presently merging their skills for developing integrated tools to help decision makers in the difficult task of integrated coastal zone management. EcoManage project aims to push the capacity of assisting managers to join horizontally knowledge from ecological and socio-economic disciplines. The three key aspects of EcoManage are (1) the consideration that a coastal zone depends on local pressures, but also on pressures originated in the drainage basin, transported mostly by rivers and by groundwater, (2) that socio-economic activities are the driving forces of those pressures and that their impacts on the ecosystem have feedback on socio-economics and (3) the impacts depend on physical characteristics of the ecosystem that together with the loads determine its ecological state. Three coastal zones showing conflicting interests between urban, industrial and agricultural pressures and environmental maintenance have been selected for developing the system. The selected areas are: Aisén Fjiord in Chile, Bahía Blanca estuary in Argentina and Santos estuary in Brazil. Relationships between the origins and consequences of environmental problems will be described using a Driving forces, Pressures, States, Impacts and Responses (DPSIR) framework and indexes will be used to assess links between DPSIR elements. Participatory methods will be applied for interaction
with stakeholders in order to establishing study scenarios and indexes
for social-economic and ecosystem analyses and to measure environmental
impacts of management decisions. Field data and modeling results will
be included into a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) for
simplifying the assessment of the impact of management scenarios and
evaluate their performance. The project will raise the opportunity to
improve normative rules for the functioning of the systems, and in this
way to improve environmental management for the estuaries towards
sustainable development. |
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About
