GEO Brasil - UNEP

4.7 Coastal and Sea Areas
One of the government programmemes related to fisheries
resources is called “REVIZEE PROGRAMMEME”. It is coordinated
by the Ministry of the Environment and was
approved by the Interministerial Commission for the
Resources of the Sea (Comissão Interministerial para os
Recursos do Mar - CIRM) in 1994. This programmeme is the
result of a commitment taken by Brazil when ratifying, in
1988, the United Nations Convention on Law Sea
(Convenção das Nações Unidas sobre o Direito do Mar -
CNUDM) regulating all uses of all maritime and oceanic
areas covering more than 70% of the surface of the earth.
The main objective of the REVIZEE programmeme is to
survey the sustainable potential of the capture of living
resources in ZEE, seeking to reach the following goals:
to register living resources in ZEE and the consequent
environmental characteristics;
to determine their biomasses; and
to establish the potentials of sustainable capture.
so as to obtain sustainability in the use of the resource,
equilibrium of the ecosystem where such activity occurs,
preservation guaranty of the genetic bank of the species or
exploited species and economic profitability of business
enterprises.
The uncertainty and the risk inherent to the process of
fisheries management (due to fishing peculiarities,
environmental variations, including climatic changes, and
the opposition of biological and economical processes),
leads the modern process of fisheries management to adopt
a precautionary focus, which recognises that the diversity
of ecological and socio-economic situations demands the
adoption of different strategies (IBAMA, 1997).
Finally, it is fundamentally important to stimulate the
creation of programmemes and projects of total fishing
quality, covering the management system, catchment,
improvement and commercialisation, thus establishing a
certification system, preferably non-governmental.
policies feedback
The closing of the activities of REVIZEE’s fisheries
prospecting is expected for December 2002, while the final
report should be concluded in December 2004.
According to the coast diagnosis accomplished by the
Tropical Database group (Base de Dados Tropical - BDT),
the conservation effort achieved to protect the sea and
estuary species can be described as follows:
Fisheries management of the main fishing;
Creation of Conservation Units, mainly referring to
islands and their surroundings, swamps,
estuaries and other regions of proven ecological value,
restricting the use of such areas;
Creation of Extractive Reserves;
Improvement of the legislation.
In spite of the existing norms for fisheries management,
decreasing results have been observed in the outcome of
fisheries, both in industrial and small scale fishing.
The term “Fisheries Management” should conceptually be
understood as a harmonious group of measures seeking to
expand or to restrict a fisheries activity. This should be done
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