Atchiae

COASTAL SUSTAINABILITY CONCEPTS
Michaël Atchia, Educational and Environmental Training Services, Mauritius

w Sustainable

The concept of sustainability describes the main objective of this workshop, namely ensuring the continued existence of a healthy coastal environment, the resources from which can be continually enjoyed by the inhabitants of the region.

w Capacity building

Capacity building is the broad-based enhancement of skills, knowledge and institutional capabilities to facilitate the achievement of sustainable development.

w Integrated

The planning of integrated coastal management involves not only the impact of human beings on environment but also the occurrence of natural hazards, such as cyclones, floods, tides in the context of the development needs and well being of the population concerned. Much data are often obtained sectorally, by separate specialists from different institutions or authorities. Similarly, planning and decision-making, now generally sectoral, are to become generally integral.

Ecosphere
The global ecosystem comprising the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere as inseparable components

Coasts
As places of transition between land and sea, the coastal areas have played a vital role in the socio-economic development of mankind

Productivity
Coastal zones are areas of high biological productivity. About 90% of world fishery catches come from near-shore and reef areas while coasts serve as nursery grounds for other open-sea fish

Environmental Literacy
Can all the in-depth research and remarkable progress made during these last 3 decades of the 20th century be of any use in the long-term unless transmitted in a systematic way to the environmentally illiterate and then to future generations?

Adapted from page 4 Atchia and Tropp 1995.

Besides the usual flexible definition of a coastal zone as a fringe of land 20-50 km wide inland from the coast, it is useful to note that in the case of many small islands (Zanzibar, Seychelles, Comoros, Réunion, Mauritius, Maldives) the size of the island makes the entire island a coastal zone.

The hinterland outside the coastal zones, where major happenings such as agricultural run-off, erosion, rivers etc. influence the coastal area, must be considered, for management purposes, together with the coastal zone.

Each of these aspects requires looking after; however for sensible results these must be looked after in relation to each other, that is integrated management.

According to Atchia (1995) there are four main processes in ‘looking after’ or environmental management:

When a communicator (the sender) sends a message to another person or persons (the receivers) he or she may have several purposes in mind:

The first assumption is that issues have been identified and solutions to these found. The role of communicators, public relations officers and educators is then to pass these on. The role of educator is of course deeper as it involves incorporating the knowledge, skills and desired behaviour into the make-up of the people they teach.

Ideally stakeholders together with communicators and educators take part in the process of issue identification and the development of solutions.

Then together they will select various media, plan intellectual as well as emotional communications, identify target groups, design communication packages, test them for retention and impact value.

Finally a campaign can apply these as required and as resources permit, and evaluate results.

SOME IDEAS FOR PROMOTING SUSTAINABLE INTEGRATED COASTAL MANAGEMENT THROUGH COMMUNICATION, EDUCATION AND PUBLIC AWARENESS

Design and implement a campaign for different key target groups from coastal areas (from school children through tourists and tourism staff to decision-makers) to introduce this concept. Environmental citizenship involves both the rights to enjoy and duties to protect the environment by all citizens.

Principle 15 of Agenda 21 (1992) states that ‘in order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied’ and ‘when threats are serious or irreversible damage is being done, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent (further) degradation’. Each concerned group should discuss how to apply this approach to their immediate surroundings. Included here is the application of environmental accounting to all governmental, para-statal, institutional and corporate accounts.

A basic and successful learning approach consists of learners actually doing things (e.g. cleaning beaches, replanting mangroves, putting up posters and bins, monitoring fish landing, doing field ecological observations and measurements such as salinity, temperature of water, species distribution, oxygen and E. coli i n lagoon water etc.) as a means of obtaining first-hand knowledge, not book or electronic information.

The objective of environmental reporting is to train journalists, public relations officers and others to provide information to the public, special groups and the decision-makers about coastal zone events. There are many vehicles for effective environmental reporting, e.g.

A strong recommendation is to have sound environment and development journalism in each member state, as a means of keeping coastal zone issues and solutions continually alive.

A workshop on ‘What’s Newsworthy’ discusses the following: new elements, nearness, timeliness, importance, names, drama or conflict, variety, human interest, humour and the key element of interest/implications in people’s lives.

One of the first environmental computer models (developed by Dennis Meadows) was about the relationship between size of fleet, intensity of fishing and fish catch of a given fishery. The modern versions are geographic information systems (GIS) which are computer hardware, software and procedures designed to analyse data spatially or geographically hence helping solve complex planning and management problems. GIS require a high level of equipment and training. Environmental models are now currently applied to complex integrated coastal zone management problems.

Global ideas about survival, human impact on the planet as a whole, global warming, sea-level rise, laws of the sea, protection of marine biodiversity, world trade and shipping etc. can be usefully discussed in the context of management of coastal zones in Africa. Introduction of the use of simple modelling, developing alternative scenarios and always doing impact assessment should become a ‘way of life’ for all environment and development in coastal zones. Production of simple guides (in print, poster form or electronically) will encourage this to happen.

United Nations, 1992. Agenda 21: Programme of Action for Sustainable Development. Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, UNCED, Rio de Janeiro, June 1992.

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