A Regional-Scale Ocean Health Index for Brazil

Cristiane T Elfes,Catherine Longo,Darren Hardy,Courtney Scarborough,Tiago Pinheiro,Benjamin D Best,Guilherme F Dutra,Benjamin S Halpern,Athanassios C Tsikliras

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0092589

Abstract

Brazil has one of the largest and fastest growing economies and one of the largest coastlines in the world, making human use and enjoyment of coastal and marine resources of fundamental importance to the country. Integrated assessments of ocean health are needed to understand the condition of a range of benefits that humans derive from marine systems and to evaluate where attention should be focused to improve the health of these systems. Here we describe the first such assessment for Brazil at both national and state levels. We applied the Ocean Health Index framework, which evaluates ten public goals for healthy oceans. Despite refinements of input data and model formulations, the national score of 60 (out of 100) was highly congruent with the previous global assessment for Brazil of 62. Variability in scores among coastal states was most striking for goals related to mariculture, protected areas, tourism, and clean waters. Extractive goals, including Food Provision, received low scores relative to habitat-related goals, such as Biodiversity. This study demonstrates the applicability of the Ocean Health Index at a regional scale, and its usefulness in highlighting existing data and knowledge gaps and identifying key policy and management recommendations. To improve Brazil's ocean health, this study suggests that future actions should focus on: enhancing fisheries management, expanding marine protected areas, and monitoring coastal habitats.

Highlights

Brazil’s coastline spans more than 7,000 km with a vast diversity of ecosystems, including extensive mangrove areas in the Amazon basin, coral reefs in the Northeast, and lagoons, estuaries and saltmarshes in the south
We discuss sub-national patterns, lessons learned from this case study analysis, and key policy implications for Brazil
Spatial patterns Differences in Food Provision scores between coastal states were driven by the Mariculture sub-goal (Table 3), as the Fisheries subgoal was evaluated only at the national level

Summary

Introduction

Brazil’s coastline spans more than 7,000 km with a vast diversity of ecosystems, including extensive mangrove areas in the Amazon basin, coral reefs in the Northeast, and lagoons, estuaries and saltmarshes in the south. Often the various activities tied to these benefits, such as fisheries, coastal development and tourism, come into conflict, and resource managers and policy makers are faced with decisions about how and where to allow and regulate each of them, with the ultimate goal of maintaining and ideally improving the overall health of the ocean and the communities that use it. Given this context, there is a great need in Brazil for tools to assess and monitor the overall health of coastal ecosystems, as well as the status of components of the system. This index to assess the health and benefits of the ocean (Ocean Health Index) evaluates the condition of coupled human-ocean systems by tracking the current status and likely future state of ten publicly held goals, ranging from food provision to jobs, tourism, and coastal protection (Table 1)

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Conclusion