Vulnerabilidade ambiental em unidades de conservação costeira (2010-2020)

Abstract

Concerns about the conservation of natural resources have increasingly occupied the field of scientific, civil, and political debate since the 1970s, due to climate change and conversion of land cover to the detriment of anthropic uses. In this sense, the establishment of Protected Areas (APs) has been recurrently used as a normative instrument and as a materialization of public policies aimed at preserving and conserving the environment. In Brazil, these units are managed through the National System of Nature Conservation Units (SNUC) at the federal, state, municipal and private levels. In the state of Rio Grande do Norte (RN), there are 23 consolidated areas, 12 of which are located in the Municipalities Facing the Sea (MDM) in spatial contexts of high production of the agricultural sector. Thus, this study proposes to evaluate the environmental vulnerability of the existing units in the potiguar coast and its adjacent areas in the period from 2010 to 2020. For this, we used a methodology based on different variables such as land cover and land use mapping (2020), measurement of deforestation of vegetation cover between 2010 and 2020, and public incentives to access rural credit between 2017 and 2019. Thus, we identified that the APA Piquiri-Una and PNM Cidade do Natal units present high vulnerability because of the high anthropic cover in their buffer and surrounding areas. In addition, the PAs had an accumulated deforestation of 26,385 hectares between 2010 and 2020 and the massive presence of agriculture (31,422 hectares) and pasture activities (15,354 hectares) in their internal limits.