Mexico’s coasts: Half-way to sustainability

Sustainability was estimated through a Sustainable Capacity Index defined as the combination of three aspects (state of the environment, quality of life of the human population, and pressure applied by human activities), used as a guideline for the differentiation of sustainability situations. We identified five different municipality groups, in terms of sustainability, as well as two thresholds, beyond which sustainable capacity was not present: below the sustainable capacity lower threshold, close to the sustainable capacity threshold, optimum situation, close to the sustainable capacity higher threshold, and above the sustainable capacity higher threshold. In general Mexico was found to be in an apparent balanced situation, in the sense that it is not overweighed around extreme values, the majority of the coastal municipalities falling in the optimum sustainable situation, within the cross comparison, characterized by medium coastal cities. We can conclude that Mexico has reached a critical point where it has to decide about the direction its coastal development has to take, since our results suggest that Mexican’s municipalities are half way to sustainability. The ideal situation would be that the optimum situation would maintain its actual low pressure with high state, but could increase its quality of life. This work provided a rapid monitoring and cross comparison tool for an estimation of the sustainable situation of Mexico’s coasts, repeatable in time, and in phase with the recent national coastal zone management principles and strategies.

Research highlights
► Sustainable capacity index considers environment, population life quality and human activities.
► Optimum sustainability combines low pressure, medium life quality and high environment state.
► Half of Mexican coastal municipalities fall in optimum situation, but not the other half.
► It is the moment to decide the sustainability of coastal Mexico.