Beach Management and Conservation in Brazil: Challenges and Opportunities

Brazilian beaches are one of the country’s main coastal assets. Despite their social-economic relevance and ecological importance, many activities (e.g., urbanization, coastal infrastructure, economic activities, and climate change) impact Brazilian beaches. Beach management approaches focus on maintaining beach quality and ecosystem services related to tourism and recreational activities, ranging from public policies to social-led processes. However, the promotion of beach conservation has additional challenges. This chapter presents an overview of Brazilian beaches’ conservation status and threats, as well as the major approaches to beach management. We identify the main challenges to Brazilian beach management and conservation based on different case studies. We argue that most of these challenges can become opportunities to invest in novel approaches, such as ecosystem-based management, that recognize beaches as social-ecological systems and promote integrated management, stakeholder involvement, and long-term-adaptive planning for sustainability.