Land-Sea Interactions: Contributions of the Brazilian Coastal Management Program to Marine Saptial Planning

Abstract

The interaction between continental and oceanic areas has long been discussed in the scientific literature. In this sense, water flows, receiving basins, and oceans are interconnected, just as problems and solutions are as well. The interaction between land and sea leads to a management challenge, as public policies, programs and/or projects often tend to act exclusively on land or in the ocean. In Brazil, the Coastal Management Program (GERCO) has been implemented since 1988, with specific legislation and a set of defined strategies and instruments. More recently, Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) has started to be discussed in the country. MSP, in many cases, tends to be more focused on marine areas, disregarding this land-sea interaction. This paper aims to identify opportunities to integrate the already consolidated basis of GERCO into MSP, highlighting the potential for integration between management instruments and their respective tools. Coastal Management instruments and strategies in Brazil were analyzed, considering the potential for overlap with the MSP. A codebook was organized taking into account keywords related to MSP, adapting the methodology to a qualitative analysis, in which these keywords were located in the instruments and strategies in question. The results allow us to infer that GERCO’s strategies and instruments have the potential to contribute to the development of the MSP in Brazil in its diagnostic; prognostic; implementation, monitoring and evaluation phases. There are opportunities for integration in all the instruments analyzed, considering their peculiarities in terms of purpose, method and scale. Considering that the MSP is a territorial planning instrument, although with the peculiarities of being focused on the ocean, one can infer that its elaboration and implementation can be catalyzed by the use of the experience and knowledge already acquired over more than 30 years of coastal management in Brazil.