Contribution to Araca Bay management: The identification and valuation of ecosystem services

Ecosystems sustain human life and its varied activities through their provision of ecosystem services. However, a wide variety of human activities are seriously harming ecosystems, as the Araca Bay in the coastal region of the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo. There is a consensus in several scientific circles about the importance of the ecosystem services economic values to support the environmental management. However, as not all the ecosystem services importance can be represented economically, other values must be estimated such as socio-cultural. The overall objective of the article was to identify and valuate the ecosystem services provided by the Araca Bay through economic and socio-cultural perspectives. We identify thirteen ecosystem services provided by the Araca Bay and we estimate the economic value of six of them based on direct and indirect methods from market observation. For the socio-cultural valuation, we rank the services based on the importance attributed to them by the local community, using the Smith's Salience Index. The sum of the estimated (annual) economic value of the ecosystem services in 2014 was US$ 340,610.29 and the most valued service was the effluent depuration. In turn, the food supply service was the most important in the socio-cultural valuation. Although economic and socio-cultural values can reveal certain contributions of Bay of Araca to the human well-being, they cannot represent well all of them, as the Bay's contribution to the subsistence of local families.