The Impact of Beaches on Our Lives

 

Beaches and their sustainable management

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By Ecological Economics Research Group

For many years, the coastal environment, and more specifically the beaches, have been suffering from irrational use, neglecting and wasting the great number of opportunities that they offer. The importance of the beach resource lies in its characteristics that make it a system as unique as it is fragile. Therefore, its study and understanding is essential in order to design management instruments oriented towards sustainability.

Beaches are defined as geomorphological units present in certain types of coasts, which respond to the supply of sediment, waves, currents and winds on an indefinite time scale that varies from one place to another. This interaction of air, water and sand constitutes a very dynamic environment that is ecologically sensitive to changes of both natural and human origin. Thus, these socio-ecological systems fulfill a double role, since they constitute natural systems that provide environmental services; while they also act as a satisfier of human needs.

On the one hand, this space constitutes one of the most important environmental assets of coastal resources, being a support of great biological wealth and a natural reservoir, and a key element for any coastal protection policy. Some of the functions fulfilled by the ecosystem services they provide are:

• Provisioning (provision of fisheries and marine products; water transport infrastructure; wave regulation and provision),
• Regulation (climate regulation; protection of the territory from storms; erosion, transport and sedimentation),
• Habitat, support or base (provision of habitat for relevant species; reproduction and dispersion of relevant hydrobiological resources),
• Cultural or aesthetic (knowledge systems; aesthetic values ​​of the landscape; sense of belonging; among others).

On the other hand, linked to cultural and aesthetic ecosystem services, the coast satisfies human needs for recreation, leisure and rest, and is also the main resource for attracting people to coastal tourist destinations. Its tourist-recreational function makes the beach a space whose environmental variables must be kept in good condition, since the preservation of nature becomes a key factor in tourism development to compete in markets that are increasingly sensitive and demanding in terms of the environment.

This variety in the conception of the coastline and its different assigned values ​​make it a common good and, at the same time, a coastal resource capable of producing economic advantages. The great diversity of uses that occur in the same space (residential use, resource exploitation, tourism-recreational use, conservation use and protection of diversity, among others), generates conflicts of interest between the actors involved who debate between its conservation and its use.

Thus, the need for beach management arises, understanding that the possible uses are very varied and extensive and the interests, often conflicting, must be harmonized to avoid the degradation of the environment, and consequently the loss of quality of the space and the recreational experience of its users.

The confluence of these interests is the main concern of the public and private sectors and society in general. Adequate management would entail coordination and planning of activities between all decision-makers, and work from an environmental perspective (avoiding negative impacts and preserving the environment), sociocultural perspective (fostering the integral development of the community and generating new infrastructure) and economic perspective (promoting the participation of local companies with quality sources of work), tending towards sustainability.

Sustainable coastal management

What is a Management System?

A management system is a systematic framework of policies, procedures and practices used to ensure that an organization can accomplish the tasks necessary to achieve its objectives. When objectives are related to environmental considerations such as a natural environment such as a beach, an Environmental Management System is developed.

What is meant by Sustainable Management?

Coastal management and planning involves planning, organizing, directing and controlling coastal resources for the correct development of activities, preserving them over time and allowing the satisfaction of needs and expectations. This way of understanding coastal space requires a strategy for the distribution of environmental, socio-cultural and institutional resources in order to achieve the conservation and multiple and sustainable use of beaches.

Understanding that tourism is only one of the activities that take place on the beach, it is necessary to approach coastal management in an integrated and holistic way, considering it a space where different processes and actors coexist. Thus, to achieve this, it is essential to overcome sectoral visions with synergistic processes at a local regional scale, which harmonize the different activities that take place in this space and the diverse uses that they imply.

Integrated and Sustainable Coastal Management, then, allows for the integrated management of all the different functions of the beach and the ecosystem services it provides. To do so, a set of actions are followed that lead to the achievement of certain objectives within the framework of the global use of the resources of the coastal strip. In this sense, both material and human resources are combined, distributed and made available to meet these objectives, with a constant evaluation of the effects being necessary to correct possible deviations. In this way, it is highlighted that the two essential concepts of this management are sustainability and evaluation.

The intention of this action proposal is to create a dynamic, intersectoral, interdisciplinary management framework that can be adapted to the particularities of each case, which will allow for the compatibility of functionalisation and conservation in an environment as complex and fragile as the coast. To do so, participatory processes must be included that involve all the actors involved in the coastal space in question, aiming to achieve agreements between disparate interests and to develop common objectives on coastal planning and management.

Management towards environmental quality and its relationship with tourism

In recent decades, coastal tourist destinations have faced the challenge of renewing themselves in order to remain in an increasingly competitive tourism market. A new demand made up of more informed, demanding and ecologically sensitive tourists, added to the emergence of sustainability as a new development paradigm, made the environment a key variable to introduce in destinations in order to gain competitiveness, both in mature destinations seeking to renew themselves and in new destinations trying to diversify.

Thus, the new trend is coastal management focused on environmental quality. Environmental quality, referring to the value judgments assigned to the state or condition of the environment adopted in a given situation and time, based on environmental variables that exert a greater influence on the present and future quality of life of the members of a human system, plays an important role for monitoring and control.

However, when implemented on beaches, this concept does not have a single definition and is understood from different dimensions such as user safety, aesthetic perception, cleanliness and waste management, ecosystem health and beach management in general.

Improving the environmental quality of beaches, in addition to impacting the quality of the resource (water, air, sand and biodiversity), is also related to the recreational tourism experience. In this way, not only is the quality of the coastal space improved but also the quality of the tourist destination as a whole.

One of the instruments that management systems often include, directly or indirectly, to improve environmental quality is certification. This voluntary tool promotes the incorporation of products and services that meet certain ecological requirements based on the monitoring of environmental indicators and the implementation of good practice programs. Beach certification is a form of comprehensive management, through indicators that provide concise information that can be easily understood and used by decision makers and the general public.

The application of standards such as ISO 9000 for Quality Management or ISO 14000 for Environmental Management, good practice manuals, eco-labels, management guidelines and self-assessment, among others, in tourism provides the possibility of incorporating the environmental variable in the management of the resource and the services provided therein, in such a way that quality is combined with the competitiveness and sustainability of the destination. Some emblematic cases in the incorporation of certifications are:

Spain: In 2015, the international jury of the annual Blue Flag award and eco-label granted 678 distinctions, 577 to beaches and 101 to Spanish marinas, thus leading the ranking of beaches in the world with this award. Statistics show that one in five Spanish beaches enjoys this benefit, as well as one in six Blue Flags worldwide, will belong to this country.
Uruguay: Based on an initiative of the Municipal Government of Montevideo, with a joint work with private consultants, the environmental management of the beaches of Pocitos, Buceo, Malvín and Ramírez has been promoted in accordance with the pre-established requirements of the aforementioned ISO 14001 standards, through the Playa Natural program.
Argentina: In our country, the incorporation of the environmental variable in beach management systems took place with the ISO 42100 standard on Quality Management for Beaches and Resorts, and later the Quality Management Guidelines and Environmental Management in Beaches and Resorts promoted by the Secretariat of Environment and Sustainable Development of the Nation and the Secretariat of Tourism of the Nation (now Ministry).

Therefore, the coastal zone must be conceived as a strategic resource for development, and to the extent that the use of this zone is carried out preventing the impacts of the activities carried out, coastal spaces with a different environmental quality will be generated, avoiding degradation. It is important to highlight the relevance of environmental quality in tourism and, particularly, of beaches for coastal tourist destinations. Offering quality in the service (spa, accommodation, catering, among others) and in the resource is the basis for a good development of the activity. Thus, both the public and private sectors must turn their attention to integrated and sustainable management systems in order to provide users with quality beaches.

The implementation of different sustainable management tools would improve the environmental conditions of the coastal area, providing quality and opportunities to compete in the market, without putting at risk the very resource that supports the activity.