Fernando Vasconcelos de Araujo
Hidely Grassi Rizzo
The Integrated Environmental Monitoring Program1 of the Brazilian Ministry of Environment, Water Resources and Legal Amazon2 is being developed as a part of a general strategy to evaluate the country's environmental performance in achieving the sustainable use of natural resources.
The program framework embodies three main axes: sustainability of the development process, as indicated in the Federal Constitution3; the identification of indicators according to the OECD's Pressure-State-Response system and; the identification of target groups, which represent the main driving activities potentially responsible for the depletion of natural resources and the polluting or degradation of the environment.
Due the complexity and extension of national territory, the application of these three axes required previous analysis to support the monitoring framework design. The Environmental Management Direction group produced a comprehensive study, Development Macro-Vectors and the Major National Ecosystems4 .This report pointed out the need to adapt indicators to the national mosaic of natural, economic and socio-cultural scenarios, while maintaining the indicators' integrity, comparability at local, regional and national levels, and communicability. To face this difficult challenge, the Ministry is carrying out a series of meetings with experts that will provide the necessary technical and scientific support for identifying and describing the indicators to be used in the MONITORE Program and in the National State of the Environment Report. This Report, an output of the monitoring process, aims to help the government and the community in their process of evaluating national environmental policy performance, as stated in the federal Constitution.
The expert consultation process is expected to provide a set of environmental indicators that will be used to describe the state of the environment and national environmental policy performance. The development of these indicators will take into consideration the potential impacts of the selected target groups (Table 1 ) within the national ecosystems, for each of the main environmental resources5, following the Pressure-State-Response system.
The pressure indicators for each target group will be systematized according to the characteristics of the ecosystems and the environmental resource, as shown in Table 2.
While dealing essentially with the sustainable use of natural resources and pollution prevention and control, the MONITORE Program will essentially deal with a large spectrum of sustainability indicators, since the constitutional concept of environment management implies the improvement of living standards and equal access to natural resources for present and future generations6 .Therefore, those indicators for social aspects of sustainable development related to the sustainable use of natural resources and quality of life, proposed by the CSD, will be considered in the MONITORE framework design. Some CSD indicators are already proposed or in use by major state agencies and will be tested, at the national level, within the MONITORE Program. These indicators are summarized in Table 3.
The feasibility of systematic data collection for these indicators and database generation for environmental monitoring will be tested in a MONITORE pilot project in 1997. However, regional disparities between the state agencies are considered an important obstacle. To help state agencies overcome technical gaps, the Ministry will promote cooperation between the state agencies and the universities, non-government organizations and the private sector. The Ministry expects that the cooperation process will do more than just facilitate the collection and analysis of information. The cooperation process will also help to promote partnerships between the different actors and facilitate access to environmental data by all sectors.
NOTES
1 The Ministry's Environmental Monitoring Program - MONlTORE
2 The term Legal Amazon defines an area comprising the Amazon Rain Forest and a transitional region with common interests and concerns in terms of ecological and economic planning.
3 Federal Constitution, Chap. VI, Art. 225
4 MMA, Os Ecossistemas brasileiros e os principais macrovetores de desenvolvimento: subsidíos ao planejamento da gestão ambiental. Ministério do Meio Ambiente, dos Recursos Hídricos e da Amazônia Legal, Secretaria de Coordenaão dos Assuntos do Meio Ambiente, Programa Nacional do Meio Ambiente -PNMA- Brasilía. MMA. 1995. 108
5 The environmental resources under consideration are:
- Air and Atmosphere
- Coastal Zone and the natural resources within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)
- Flora, Fauna and the Biodiversity
- Inland Waters
- Soils
6 Federal Constitution, Chapter VI, Art. 225