Etapas realizadas: - SEDAC



Prepared for presentation at the Open Meeting of the Human Dimensions of the Global Environmental Change Research Community. Rio de Janeiro, 6-8 October, 2001.

The Quest for Sustainable Development in a Local Context: the Case Study of Jurumirim Hydrographic Basin,

Angra dos Reis County, Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil.

➢ Cacilda Nascimento de Carvalho, gema@.br

➢ Denise Kronemberger, dpkrone@.br

➢ Laura Bárbara de Oliveira, laura_barbara@.br

➢ Regilene Coutinho de Souza, regiline@.br

➢ Cristiane Nunes Francisco, nunes@.br

SUMMARY TOPICS:

A field research project on the quest for Sustainable Development.

Participatory methods and Informed Decision-Making support

Community and ecosystem-based research

Assisting land resources allocation on a Sustainable Development context

Knowledge Management under Geographic Information System (GIS)

STUDY AREA

STUDY AREA

Jurumirim Hydrographic Basin

THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN A LOCAL CONTEXT AND THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS.

Sustainable Development to the poor nations means a difuse and lasting economic development. As difuse as to be attained by the majority of the society, and as lasting as to include the future generations. Being durable also means that it has to be environmentally sustainable. The pursuit of this goal is a multidisciplinary complex task that needs to consider the synergic effects of the physical, ecological, cultural, economic, social, historical and technological peculiarities that defines a place where people live (SANTOS,(Santos 1996). The technological issue has itself its own echoes in the other dimensions. It represents the tremendous capacity of transformation mankind has. It is a function of the state-of-art of the technological development, worlwide, of the human resources and the social and economic capital, and of the natural renewable resources available for the transformation. These are the tradable goods to be exchanged between the poor and the rich countries (Carvalho & Brown, 1996). While Homo sapiens sapiens is quickly transforming himself and hardly dealing with his emotional fitness, there will be a time when we will see him evolving to Homo sapiens solidarius. Meanwhile we must pay much more attention to the human Dimensions aspects of the approaching Sustainable Development. The local scale context is imperative to facilitate community perception of problems, its engagement in scenarios generation, and in building consensus decisions. In the poor countries it urges to achieve new income sources by improving education and health, and by fostering alternative activities that can help empower women and young people. This is the only and long way to build the necessary citizenchip needed to decision making.

MAIN OBJECTIVES

To deal with the quest of pursuing the Sustainable Development this research aims:

• To identify, describe, analyse and understand the physical and social environment, in a dynamic context.

• To develop participatory field research projects, dovetailing initiatives of local communities, enabling them to legitimize and share adaptive strategies.

• To explore land-use scenarios, evaluating their uncertainties and consequences.

• To integrate the local-scale scientific knowledge to a regional and global approach.

METHODOLOGY

In order to access land suitability for Sustainable Development we mapped the basin by overlaying maps of geology, relief, soil types, agriculture suitability, hydrologic, mineral and scenic resources, and vulnerability to natural and man-induced hazards using a Geographic Information System.

To evaluate the communitary potentialities for Sustainable Development we have faced difficulties in adapting global indicators of Sustainable Development to the local scale due to lack of data availability. Personal interviews with local leaders and the use of health post statistics have helped solve this problem. Methodology flowchart (Fig. 1) figures the next step of knowledge enhancing, namely the Facilitation & Synthesis (F&S) activity: after turning data into information, the analysts organize community meetings that aim to leverage participatory integration between stakeholders, by knowledge transfer. These F&S activities will be held in the next steps of designing Preliminary Scenarios of land resources allocation on a Sustainable Development context for the basin. These scenarios are technical-scientific proposals for Sustainable Development, undertaken after the identification of named priorities, to be discussed with partners and stakeholders. Proceeded from the communitary decision, a Local Consensual Scenario will fit the policy formulations for Sustainable Development of the hydrographic basin, and must be legitimized by municipality stakeholders as a Sustainable Development Planning for the Jurumirim Hydrographic Basin.

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Fig. 1: Methodology Flowchart

FIRST RESULTS

Mapping physical and socio-economic available data to access land suitability and communitary potentialities for Sustainable Development gave these preliminary results: 280 families live in Jurumirim HB. Most of the 950 people (14p/km2) is less than 20 years old, but there are many adults under 40 and some elders above 60 (Fig. 2).

At present almost all of the children and teenagers under 15 are in the school, but this age is remarkable threshold, as people between 15 and 24 are not enrolled in school, similarly to Burkina Faso (Fig. 3). Almost half (47%) of adults have less than four years of school frequency and 86% have less than eight years. The iliteracy rate is typical of the biggest slam in Rio de Janeiro City (Rocinha Slam), and the number of iliterate women is twice that of mem. Worst yet, 30% of the family heads are iliterate or have between four and seven years of study (Fig. 4).

The results above emphasize the need of improving education to leverage new income sources and empower specially women and young people. Fig. 5 shows that most of the people are housewives (41%) and students (27%), activities that do not contribute to GNP. The worst of it is that in this rural basin there are more unemployed and retired adults than people working in agriculture or commerce and industry. The service sector is represented by unskilled hand labor. Monthly family income (Fig. 6) is tipically about 1 to 3 minimum wage; considering a mode of four people/family, each people earns about US$2/day. Data concerning this subject are the most difficult to get due to social/cultural barriers, but have been easily gatthered by a team of teenagers interviewing their neighbours, during a meeting in the local school (Photos a – c).

Priorities for Sustainable Development are similar to other areas in the county: basic sanitation, education, and income generation. Fig. 7 sumaryzes the proposal of an Integrated Action Plain (PAI, in portuguese, which means father in English). It has been presented and discussed with the community, and some of the partners and stakeholders during the first F&S activity meeting. This policy planning is meant to achieve new income sources by leveraging education and health activities, by improving agricultural land use of alternative products of the Atlantic Coast Forest, and by fostering eco-tourism and handcrafting. The great challenge is to make it a spreaded, difuse and integrated plain: to be successful it has to be raised by communitary efforts and not by insulate inputs of influential individuals and political concerns.

• Fig. 7 - Integrated Action Plan for the Sustainable Development of the Basin:

NEXT STEPS: IS POVERTY AN OBSTACLE TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT?

As can be read in IUCN, 2001: People are the problem.... And the solution!

The Nature at Jurumirim Hydrographic Basin and at the Ilha Grande Bay region as a whole is still quite untouched and magnificent.... moslty because people over there had not have as yet the capital resources needed to deeply transform the landscape. So, it is still time to help them get environmental awareness, citizenship empowering, new income sources, and healthier environment, taking into account the reconciliation of external demographic pressures and geoecology. These are the patterns of sustainability to be unfold to other small hydrographic basins of Tropical Rainforest ecosystem, conserving biodiversity and a representative patch of Atlantic Rainforest Biosphere Reserve.

Are we telling that poverty is by now serving our intents of preserving nature for the future generations? Strongly not, because this is an unbearable condition that humankind has to face, in order to keep the “Earth spacecraft” going on. The research community on global changes is trying to deal with the human dimensions problems across space and time scales, developing many important tools, as distributed assessment systems (CASH, 2001), and decision support systems that can help to achieve our goals. Meanwhile, depravation and its multiple facets of poverty, marginalization, discrimination, rootlessness or vulnerabity (MABOGUNJE, 2001) strike our everyday routine, somehow showing a new era of equilibrium, difficult to distinguish in the shadows they bring.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CARVALHO, F.M.M. & BROWN, I.F. (1996) Polarization of biotic and economic wealth: the world, the tropics and Brazil. Int. J. Environ. and Pollution. 6(2):160-171.

CASH, D. W. (2000) Distributed assessment systems: an emerging paradigm of research, assessment and decision-making for environmental change. Global Environmental Change, 10:241-244.

SANTOS, M. (1996). A natureza do espaço - Técnica e tempo. Razão e emoção. São Paulo, Editora Hucitec.

MABOGUNJE, A.L. (2001) Poverty and the environment. Paper presented at the 2001 Open Meeting of the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Research Community. Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian Academy of Sciences/IAI/IHDP/CIESIN.

IUCN (2001) Core principles of assessment. Available at:

/eval/english/core.htm

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Morro do Valonguinho s/n.

24020-007. Niterói, RJ. Brazil.

Tel/fax: 55-21-27174189

A critical issue for the population has been sewage contamination of the local river that we are assessing with water quality analysis and a sanitation project for the main village.

Fig. 3 – Educational Indicators

Angra dos Reis County

The southeast coast of Brazil has undergone massive deforestation and accelerating urbanization in the past few decades. Neverthless, close to the city of Rio de Janeiro (155km southwestward) there is one of the largest fragments of the remaining Atlantic Coastal Forest, covering 80% of the steep slopes of Angra dos Reis and Paraty counties, by the Ilha Grande (Great Island) Bay. Angra dos Reis has 120 thousand inhabitants, clustered downtown and in few other urban villages. The region faces many of the current problems of the developing countries: high unemployment, degrading natural resources, and rapid population growth. The image below shows in dark pink the urban clusters and in light pink the pasture coverture, easily seen at the Jurumirim Hydrographic Basin, where the plain, which occupies 13% of the basin area, is owned by only one proprietor.

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...and many clear and inviting brooks where children enjoy bathing

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The rural Jurumirim hydrographic basin has the Atlantic Coastal Forest covering more than 60% of its 68 km2, mainly on the highest and steepest slopes. It has the largest mangrove area and one of the largest areas available for urban growth in the county

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Approximately a thousand persons live in villages, rural residences, small farms, and a few cattle ranches. Two paved roads, several gravel-roads, and railroad and energy transmission lines cross the basin.

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It also contains the solid-waste disposal site of the county…

Fig.2 -Total Population by Age Groups

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b) Linking people and researchers: our teen-aged interviewers from the local community

Fig. 4 - Years of Study

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Fig. 5 - Activities of Population

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Fig. 6 - Family Income

Minimum monthly wage, US $ 70

(100 interview)

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a) Facilitation & Synthesis: the first meeting in the local school

c) 3D model made of gypsum by the geography teacher and his students

Tourism

English

Technical Education

Basic Education

Visitors’ Center

Tourist Doorway/Urbanization

Communitarian Day Nursery

EcoTourism

Handcrafting

-Atlantic Forest Products

- Sewage Treatment

- Waste Recycling

Environmental Quality

Quality of Life

New Income

Souces

Capacitation

Sanitation

Community

Center

Integrated Action Plan

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