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EVALUATION OF SUSTAINABILITY INDICATORS FOR COASTAL MUNICIPALITIES OF THE STATE OF RIO DE JANEIRO (BRAZIL) USING FREE SOFTWARE

RAQUEL DEZIDERIO SOUTO

Building: Cape Town International Convention Centre
Room: Golden Gate Room (Room 2.4a)
Date: 2008-10-02 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM
Last modified: 2008-09-09

Abstract


The State of Rio de Janeiro, in accordance with the "Demographic Census 2000" from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, is the brazilian state with bigger ratio of urban population (96.52%). With population expansion, the formulation and application of the techniques to monitor and control processes induced by human activities at the coastal zone are basics to the social secure in harmony with the environment. This paper shows the evaluation of the sustainability indicators for the coastal cities of the State of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), leading account the analyzes of 41 socioenvironmental thematic indicators, calculated from 49 parameters, using six different dimensions of sustainable development (space, cultural, economic, ecological, social and politics). Those were applied to 34 coastal municipalities from Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), classifying these in regions with low, middle or hight degrees of the anthropogenic impact. The basic data sets were obtained from oficial institutions and data not informed in the sets (5%) were calculated by the bivariate statistics correlation. All data were treated with free software (Debian Sarge GNU/Linux, MySQL Server 4.1 and Web Server Apache 2) and the final product, available at Internet, the "Atlas of Sustainability Indicators for Coastal Municipalities of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil", was writed in PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) language, including the thematics maps online generated. A logical model of database was developed to store the data and the metadadata associated. The indexes of each dimension were calculated by arithmetic mean of the components indexes. The final index "General Index of the Anthropogenic Impact - GIAI" was calculated by weighted arithmetic mean, with value of 2 to pound applicated to indexes of the economic, social and ecological dimensions; value of 1.5 to pound applicated to indexes of the space and political dimensions and value of 1 to cultural dimension. Exploratory statistical analysis was realized to base the classification of municipalities, following the intervals: a) High impact - maximun value of the series to limit 1 (L1), where L1 = (mean + standard deviation of series); b) Medium impact - limit 1 (L1) to limit 2 (L2), where L2 = (mean - standard deviation of series); and c) Low impact - Limit 2 (L2) to minimum value of the series. When the sum or difference between the mean and the standard deviation exceeded the limits of maximum or minimum values, the standard error of the mean was used in substitution of the standard deviation at the formulas of the L1 and L2 limits. As principal results obtained, the cultural dimension showed the bigger average (0.7925 ? 0.2568), followed of politics (0.6214 ? 0.1305), ecological (0.3618 ? 0.1775), social (0.3431 ? 0.1131), space (0.3398 ? 0.1383) and economic (0.3014 ? 0.0587). The greater percentual of municipalities with index above of the average was obtained for the cultural dimension (70.59%), followed of ecological, economic, social and politics (52.94%) and space (47.06%). In relation of the GIAI, 52.94% of the municipalities showed indexes above the mean, where 38.89% of municipalities belonged to Guanabara Bay Litoral, 38.89% to Lakes Region Litoral, 16.67% to North-fluminense Litoral and 5.56% to South Litoral. The three higher indexes of anthropogenic impact were obtained to the municipalities: Belford Roxo (0.5123), Rio das Ostras (0.4987) and Rio de Janeiro (0.4962). And the three lowest indexes to: S?o Jo?o da Barra (0.3041), Nil?polis (0.3400) and Paraty (0.3480). The use of the free software is incentivated for governamental organizations to reduce costs of treatment of socioeconomic data and to guarantee stability and security of applications. The evaluation of sustainability indicators contributes for the analyses of the socioenvironmental characteristics of coastal cities, still searching to perfectioning the public polices instruments effectives at Brazil.