Additional relevant information

Originally, the group was engaged in the construction of a project (IBSA) aiming to apply the MA methodologies for the coastal zone of Brazil and comparing the results with similar initiatives agreed with South African and Indian groups. It was a sub-national assessment, which scale was selected by reducing the geographical area to a Brazilian region (South-South East with ~3000 km of coast line), which represents well the diversity of environments and social pressures at the national scale (~8000 km). The three groups of IBSA had to present the proposal for financial support at the national agencies, which had established a tri-national agreement for scientific purposes, focusing one of the priorities on ecosystem assessment. The Indian group failed to submit their proposal on due time and our IBSA initiative was not considered for support by the funding committee. Then, it was a failure, and forced the Brazilian group to change the strategy.

After this impasse, we were forced to redirect our effort to find a way to implement what we were planning for the IBSA exercise but without any financial support. In order not to lose the enthusiasm, which bonds any team and was initially great, instead of looking around for support funds with the original project, we decided to search for ongoing projects to associate with, proposing the MA and SGA approaches to other groups in order to collaborate in an initial small scale Prove of Concept coastal assessment. In such a way, we approached the Biota Project with success. This project will consider Araçá Bay, São Sebastião, São Paulo (Fig. 1), as a model for the study, with future applications to other regions. Simultaneous gathering and analysis of data, according to the type of habitat, will allow this region to be investigated from a unified viewpoint, examining issues related to the present state of the area and its ecological, social, economic, and political importance, thus permitting a dialogue between science and decision-makers. The Biota project is structured in study modules: 1- Plankton System; 2- Nekton System; 3- Benthic System; 4- Mangrove System; 5- Hydrodynamics; 6- Sediment Dynamics; 7- Trophic Interactions; 8- Fisheries Assessment; 9- Identification and Valuation of Ecosystem Services; 10- Integrated Management; and 11- Ecological Modeling. The former IBSA team will be integrated in several modules and, particularly, at Module 9 dealing with the assessment and valuation of ecosystem services.

The Bay of Araçá, located in São Sebastião, on the northern coast of São Paulo state, constitutes the last testimony of existing preserved mangrove areas in the stretch between Bertioga and Ubatuba, since other mangrove areas were decimated by human occupation. The Araçá is an area of great complexity and consists of a small bay bordered by rocky coasts and covering four beaches (Deodato, Pernambuco, Germano and Top), two islets (Pernambuco and Pedroso), three main cores of mangrove forests, and an extensive plain of soft bottom, fully exposed in periods of low tide, particularly at spring tides. The beaches slope is gently, with width of the intertidal zone of 50-300 m, and consisting of sandy-muddy sediments, relatively compact, and gravels. Thus, Araçá can be classified as a sheltered bay, with hydrodynamics dominated by the tide, but it also suffers the action of waves of low amplitude. Due to the proximity of the urban settlements, their biotopes have been exposed for many years to different types of human action, such as irregular occupations, domestic sewage and the proximity of the Port of San Sebastian and the Oil Terminal of Petrobras, and affected by constant oil spills and other disturbances (Amaral et al., 2010).

The valuation of resources and ecosystem services has implications that transcend a mere technique to value environmental attributes, either as expressed through economic assumptions or by goals such as physical laws and biological principles, since the aim is to bring visibility by integrating them into the economic rationality and into the importance of sustaining life provided by nature. Moreover, the environmental valuation is looking legitimacy, not only to better understand the role of natural resources, but to reflect awareness of its uses.

The Brazilian Coast Assessments project methodology is based on the Millennium Assessment practices (MEA, 2005), on the SWOT (Fig. 2) method (Paliwal, 2006) and other best practices, including ecological economy valuation. Ecological economics is a school of thought that seeks to analyze the functioning of the economic system grounded in physical and biological assumptions. Ecological economics is a transdisciplinary approach that considers the full range of inter-relationship between economic and ecological systems (Costanza, 1991) and seeks to integrate these systems in the investigation of a new concept, encompassing these disciplines. According to the same author (Costanza, 1994), this new vision incorporates the notions of space, time and subsystems to be studied, allowing a wider scope. The difficulty in dealing with economic issues together with environmental led several authors in search of different approaches to evaluating products and ecosystem services.

According to Beaumont et al. (2007), one can divide the marine products, resources and ecosystem services into four categories, mainly associated with the local biodiversity. These categories, in turn, can be classified better if we re-organize them in the form of marine goods and services used to evaluate the contribution to the welfare of humanity, as shown below. Coastal goods and services:

• Production Services: Food, Mineral and not Mineral Resources.

• Regulating services: Climate regulation; Prevention of floods and storms.

• Purification of effluents: self-purification capacity.

• Cultural services: Cultural heritage and identity; Cognitive Benefits.

• Leisure and Recreation: Leisure and recreation; Wellness (non-use value)

• Future Benefits: Options Value; Resilience and resistance (life support); Habitat; Nutrient cycling

This will be the task of this more spatially restricted assessment, which will put the evaluation of ecosystem services, understood as opportunities and strengths in the SWOT framework, into the context of marine spatial planning.

This is an incremental project, departing, at the first step, with a single (well representative) site, with the idea of using it as a prove of concept, extending to other sites, covering sub-national levels and, finally, the National one which, by the Brazilian size, could be also a regional representation.