Indicadores de sustentabilidade ambiental de cidades localizadas em áreas estuarinas

Abstract

The proposal and understanding of sustainable development require methods to make it possible its quantification and qualification based on indicators established to measure the sustainability of a system, using different variables that aim at the sustainability or not of a certain place. For this Research, two municipalities were chosen, Bragança (Brasil) and Esmeraldas (Ecuador), both with high environmental fragility and existence of protected areas made up by the ecosystem mangrove, with the goal of analyzing the level of sustainability in estuarine, Amazonian and Andean areas, by using he tool called Sustainability Barometer (SB). Forty indicators provided by official sources from both countries were selected, 23 of them were social, 3 were economic and the last 14 were environmental, the results showed that the municipality of Bragança (Brasil) reached the position of “Potentially Unsustainable to Intermediate” and the town of Esmeraldas (Ecuador) go tan “Intermediate performance”. This way, the results reached by the SB and the individual evaluation of the indicators, the environmental one in particular, set the evaluated environments in a risky situation, especially with the advance in percentage of the vegetal cover variation in areas close to water course of the region.