Abstract
There is a considerable gap linking human dimensions and marine ecosystem services with Sustainable Development Goals, and one of these issues relate to differing perspectives and ideas around concepts of human development. There is also a lack of contemporary evaluations of coastal communities from developing nations under the lens of wellbeing and social vulnerability indexes. This study contributes to that discussion by presenting an analysis of Brazilian coastal municipalities, based on two indexes: The Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) and the Municipal Human Development Index (MHDI). These indicators intend to map some aspects of social well-being and development in the Brazilian territory under different perspectives. MHDI illustrates the average population conditions in a certain territory for humans to thrive, while the SVI points more specifically to the lack of assets necessary for wellbeing in a territory. The main aims are to map inequalities between coastal municipalities based on these two indexes and to provide a critical view reinforcing the importance of also considering natural capital as a key issue for wellbeing. Both indexes were developed with data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics Census of 2010, the most recent one available for municipalities. Overall, 65.9 and 78% of a total of 387 Brazilian coastal municipalities assessed were ranked below SVI and MHDI country average values, respectively. Both indexes indicated higher human development conditions in Southern municipalities than in Northern ones, especially for income and education conditions, also showing large heterogeneity of discrepancies among and within regions. The importance of combined approaches for local socioeconomic wellbeing improvements, as measured by the MHDI and the SVI, and natural capital optimization seems essential for improvements in coastal communities’ quality-of-life conditions.
Highlights
Coastal regions are expected to degrade in the coming decades due to pollution, overexploitation, climate change, industrial and infrastructure development, and other human interventions, leading to a loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services and requiring integrated actions to deal with associated social impact (Turner et al, 1996; Lam et al, 2020)
Social Vulnerability Indicators of Coastal Municipalities as a representation of national development and wellbeing plays a central role in that degradation, putting at risk the livelihoods of traditional coastal communities, raising concern on the need for a sustainable “blue economy” in the coming decades (Patil et al, 2016; Hoof et al, 2019; Rudolph et al, 2020)
We present for the first time the Municipal Human Development Index (MHDI) and the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) for the whole set of Brazilian coastal municipalities
Summary
Coastal regions are expected to degrade in the coming decades due to pollution, overexploitation, climate change, industrial and infrastructure development, and other human interventions, leading to a loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services and requiring integrated actions to deal with associated social impact (Turner et al, 1996; Lam et al, 2020). Social Vulnerability Indicators of Coastal Municipalities as a representation of national development and wellbeing plays a central role in that degradation, putting at risk the livelihoods of traditional coastal communities, raising concern on the need for a sustainable “blue economy” in the coming decades (Patil et al, 2016; Hoof et al, 2019; Rudolph et al, 2020). Together with the global financial and environmental crisis, socioeconomic inequalities opened spaces for alternative development theories, where the State plays an essential role in regulating the economic system, directing investments, GDP growth, and income distribution, and providing essential services to the population, to promote a more equal and sustainable level of wellbeing across the population (Minsky, 1975; Keynes, 2018). The core of the system in this theory is that GDP growth is the ultimate goal of economic development
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