This article was first published on 26 August 2025 by LAB partner Amazônia Latitude and translated for LAB by Stanton Geyer. You can read the original, in Portuguese, here.
Fishing communities are demanding recognition of ‘marétorios’ and meaningful participation in decisions over Brazil’s jurisdictional waters (‘Amazônia Azul’) amid the expansion of Marine Spatial Planning and offshore wind energy.
Brazil has one of the largest maritime territories in the world. Known strategically as the Amazônia Azul, it comprises approximately 5.7 million km² of Brazilian jurisdictional waters. Despite its geopolitical, economic, and ecological importance, state planning of this space continues to systematically overlook the rights of traditional coastal and marine communities. These communities occupy both land and sea areas that are essential to their subsistence, known as marétorios.
The urgency of including these communities in public policy is growing as Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) advances and the recent Offshore Law (Law No. 14,300 of 2022) takes effect, both of which risk deepening socioenvironmental impacts in fishing territories.
This underscores the need for a legal and socioenvironmental debate on the obligation of the Brazilian state – particularly the Navy and the Ministry of the Environment – to guarantee free, prior, and informed consultation with communities living in marétorios. This should include recognizing social cartography and communities’ self-identification of their traditional territories as legitimate instruments of territorial recognition and democratic participation.
A maritime frontier or a territory of rights?
The term Amazônia Azul was coined by the Brazilian Navy to emphasize the strategic importance of the country’s maritime spaces. Like the Amazon rainforest, this territory is rich in biodiversity, natural resources, and sociocultural diversity, and is increasingly subject to economic pressure and competing claims over its use. Despite its growing political and institutional use, the term still lacks a consolidated legal definition. It has, however, been recognized in Law No. 13,187 of 2015, which established the National Day of the Amazônia Azul.
The comparison with the Amazon rainforest reveals clear similarities. In both cases, traditional communities have occupied these territories for generations, sustaining livelihoods, preserving knowledge, and resisting extractive models of exploitation. Yet while forest populations have secured more robust legal recognition, particularly through Indigenous Territories and Quilombola territories, coastal and marine communities remain largely invisible within Brazil’s territorial governance framework.
The only legal instrument that has, to some extent, made the geographical uses and occupations of fishing communities visible is the Term of Authorisation for Sustainable Use (Termo de Autorização de Uso Sustentável, TAUS). This mechanism was established by Law No. 9,636 of 1998 and regulated by Ordinance No. 89 of 15 April 2010, issued by the Secretariat for Federal Assets (Secretaria do Patrimônio da União, SPU). However, it remains limited, given the SPU’s insufficient institutional and technical capacity to manage and regulate the entire coastline of Brazil.
Marétorios: coastal and marine traditional territories
Marétorios are spaces of life and culture for traditional communities that maintain a symbiotic relationship with the sea, estuaries, mangroves, and islands. They are both a political and epistemic concept, developed by fishing communities themselves and by social movements such as the Conselho Pastoral dos Pescadores (CPP) and the Articulação Nacional das Pescadoras (ANP). The concept expands conventional understandings of territory to include the knowledge, practices, life trajectories, and spiritualities associated with the sea.
The concept of marétorio emerged from an epistemological shift led by women from artisanal fishing and extractive communities during a workshop held in 2008 at the São João da Ponta Extractive Reserve, in Pará. At the workshop, an elder posed the question: ‘But is it territory or tides?’ This provocation sparked reflection on the inadequacy of the term ‘territory’ to capture the symbolic, productive, and existential ties these communities maintain with coastal and marine environments. From that moment onwards, the term marétorio – a combination of maré (tide) and território (territory) – began to be used by leaders within Brazil’s coastal and marine Extractive Reserves as a political and epistemic category.
The term expresses the fluid, cyclical, and ancestral relationship that traditional coastal and marine communities maintain with tidal ecosystems. It recognizes a form of territorial identity grounded not only in physical occupation, but also in the knowledge, practices, and spiritualities shaped by the rhythms of the water. Gradually incorporated into the agenda of the Comissão Nacional de Fortalecimento das Reservas Extrativistas (Confrem), the concept has become central to demands for public policies responsive to the specificities of these communities. It has also challenged academic institutions to engage with the concept on its own terms, in ways that are respectful and situated.
Despite their socioenvironmental relevance, marétorios are not yet recognized as a distinct legal category. Legislative proposals in this direction do exist, such as Bill No. 131 of 2020, which seeks to establish the legal category of Traditional Fishing Territories. At the same time, communities have advanced social cartography processes that document their territories of use, ecological calendars, and the threats they face.
Marcelo Reis, a resident of the fishing municipality of São João de Pirabas, in Pará, embodies this ancestral relationship with the sea. Following his family’s tradition for 18 years, he describes fishing not merely as an economic activity, but as an intrinsic part of his identity:
It’s very good, because it’s something I learned. It goes generations back. My father was also a fisherman. I still fish today, and I don’t really know how long that will continue. For me, it means a lot.
This deep connection with the environment is reflected in practical knowledge and in routines shaped by nature, both of which are essential to the definition of marétorio. Marcelo describes this interdependence:
We have our own routine, our own calendar. It’s very useful. The mangroves, for example, there are people who harvest crabs there. If there are no mangroves, there are no crabs. Some people make a living from this, from turu and mussels. And if we don’t have control over where, or even when, we fish then we end up losing out. It’s our knowledge, something we’ve learned through hard work.
This experience highlights how the lack of recognition of these knowledges and spaces undermines not only subsistence, but also identity and sustainable management practices.
The Territórios Vivos Platform, developed by the Ministério Público Federal (MPF) in partnership with the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), is a collaborative digital tool aimed at strengthening the territorial rights of traditional peoples and communities in Brazil, including fishing communities who hold marétorios. The platform enables participatory social cartography, allowing communities themselves to autonomously document their territorialities, ways of life, and the threats they face. The initiative recognizes the value of traditional knowledge and promotes the production of territorial knowledge grounded in the epistemologies of these communities. In doing so, it advances socioenvironmental justice and supports public policies for recognition, protection, and consultation.
Through collaborative mapping, the Territórios Vivos Platform strengthens collective identity, documents territorial rights, and supports the work of the Ministério Público Federal and other public institutions in the defence of fundamental rights. For traditional fishing communities, whose coastal and marine territories are often not formally recognized, the platform offers a concrete pathway for making marétorios visible. It can also serve as a basis for public civil actions, advocacy with public authorities, environmental licensing processes, and procedures for free, prior, and informed consultation, as established under ILO Convention 169.
Marine Spatial Planning and the risks of invisibility
Within the framework of the United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda, Brazil has committed to implementing Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) that reconciles the multiple uses of the sea, including fishing, tourism, environmental conservation, defence, maritime transport, and, more recently, offshore wind energy. In principle, this instrument of marine territorial governance is intended to promote ecological sustainability, economic efficiency, and social inclusion, based on the principles of integrated and participatory ocean governance.
However, the development of Brazil’s MSP has been criticised for failing to ensure the effective participation of traditional communities living in marétorios. Their exclusion from decision-making spaces constitutes a violation of the right to free, prior, and informed consultation, as guaranteed by Article 231 of the Federal Constitution and ILO Convention 169, ratified by Brazil in 2002.
This exclusion is directly experienced by communities themselves. Reflecting on the participation of fishers in political discussions, Marcelo highlights the disconnect between decision-making spaces and local realities:
We fishers, when it comes to politics, we’re basically excluded.
This perception reinforces broader critiques that MSP has failed to ensure meaningful participation and uphold the right to free, prior, and informed consultation.
There is also a systematic disregard for the social cartographies produced by communities themselves as legitimate tools for territorial planning. These participatory mapping processes not only reveal traditional uses and affective and cultural ties to territories, but also identify zones of conflict, socioenvironmental threats, and priorities for conservation.
Ignoring them amounts to rendering invisible not only territories, but also ways of life, sustainable practices, and community-based forms of ocean governance.
The risk, therefore, is that MSP becomes captured by corporate and technocratic interests, facilitating an industrial occupation of the seas driven by large-scale infrastructure and energy projects at the expense of the ways of life and social reproduction of fishing communities.
The exclusion of marétorios from this process undermines not only environmental effectiveness but also deepens historical inequalities and reproduces colonial patterns of territorial governance.
For Brazil’s MSP to align with constitutional and international commitments to socioenvironmental justice, it must urgently incorporate mechanisms for meaningful participation, recognize social cartographies as legitimate planning tools, and embed intercultural approaches in maritime governance.
Without this, the so-called Amazônia Azul will remain an economic frontier rather than a territory of rights.
The new Offshore Law and the intensification of impacts
The enactment of Law No. 14,300 of 2022, which establishes the legal framework for distributed microgeneration and minigeneration in Brazil, including the regulation of offshore wind energy, signals a new frontier for the country’s energy sector.
Aligned with efforts to expand renewable energy sources and mitigate climate change, this development is often framed as part of a so-called just energy transition. However, these anticipated benefits must be weighed against the territorial, environmental, and social impacts such projects may generate, particularly in marétorios occupied by traditional fishing communities.
The installation of offshore wind farms requires large exclusion zones, which often overlap with areas of intensive small-scale fishing and long-standing traditional uses of marine space. This overlap can restrict access to fishing territories, disrupt traditional routes, alter coastal ecosystems, and, in some cases, lead to displacement or loss of livelihoods.
As a result, despite being framed in the language of sustainability, offshore wind energy can intensify territorial and environmental conflicts, particularly when implemented without free, prior, and informed consultation with affected populations, as required by Article 231 of the Federal Constitution and ILO Convention 169.
The absence of specific legal and institutional safeguards for traditional communities in environmental licensing procedures and in the planning of project locations reveals a serious deficit of environmental justice. In practice, the current model of energy expansion risks reproducing colonial logics of appropriation of the commons, now shifting from land to sea, while rendering invisible the ways of life of populations that have historically sustained small-scale fishing and the conservation of marine ecosystems.
For the energy transition to be genuinely just, it must also be democratic, participatory, and intersectional, recognizing the central role of coastal communities in the governance of the territories they have occupied for generations. This requires not only the active inclusion of communities living in marétorios in decision-making processes, but also the creation of specific safeguards for territorial, socioeconomic, and cultural protection, ensuring respect for their right to self-determination.
Without these mechanisms, the transition to clean energy risks reproducing the same structures of exclusion that have historically shaped ‘development’ projects in Brazil.
The urgency of inclusion and legal recognition
The Amazônia Azul cannot be treated merely as a geopolitical and economic space. Like the Amazon rainforest, it encompasses ways of life, cultural territories, and collective rights. The legal invisibility of marétorios undermines not only the protection of these communities but also the sustainability of environmental policy and marine spatial governance.
Defending the Amazônia Azul as a territory of rights places a duty on the Brazilian state to recognize and protect marétorios as legitimate spaces of existence, resistance, and knowledge production for traditional fishing communities. These communities do not merely inhabit the sea, but actively shape and care for it through sustainable ancestral practices that have been systematically ignored by public policy and maritime planning frameworks.
The legal and political invisibility of marétorios now stands as one of the central challenges to achieving socioenvironmental justice in Brazil.
It is essential that Brazil’s Marine Spatial Planning incorporates the social cartographies of fishing territories and recognizes marétorios as a foundation for building just policies. The Brazilian Navy and the Ministry of the Environment must coordinate with social movements, academic institutions, and oversight bodies to ensure transparency, equity, and participation.
The expansion of Marine Spatial Planning and offshore wind energy requires an urgent reorientation of institutional strategies for ocean governance. The exclusion of traditional communities from decision-making processes, the failure to uphold the right to free, prior, and informed consultation, and the disregard for social cartographies as legitimate tools of territorial recognition all point to the reproduction of historical inequalities in new forms.
The energy transition and the governance of marine spaces must not reproduce the same patterns of authoritarian and exclusionary ‘development’.
Therefore, including marétorios in maritime public policy – through legal recognition, the effective participation of communities, and the valuing of their epistemologies – is not only a legitimate demand of these populations, but a constitutional, ethical, and environmental imperative. Without this inclusion, Brazil risks undermining not only its international commitments to sustainability and human rights, but also the very viability of a maritime sovereignty that is democratic, plural, and rooted in the territories that sustain it.
The consolidation of a truly democratic maritime sovereignty depends on rebuilding the federal pact with ocean peoples as the true guardians of the Amazônia Azul.
This text was originally published in Folha de S. Paulo.
About the authors
Luís de Camões Lima Boaventura is a federal prosecutor (procurador da República), a specialist in Public Law from the Escola Superior do Ministério Público da União (ESMPU), and holds a master’s degree in Law from the University of Brasília. His work focuses on socioenvironmental justice.
Lívia Nascimento Tinôco is a Regional Federal Prosecutor (Procuradora Regional da República) and represents the Ministério Público Federal (MPF) on the National Council of Traditional Peoples and Communities (CNPCT). She specialises in environment, sustainable development, and strategic intelligence.
Marcos Colón is Professor of Media and Indigenous Communities at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. He is the author of The Amazon in Times of War (2024) and editor of Utopias Amazônicas (2025).
Original editing and revision by Juliana Carvalho
Original page design and layout by Alice Palmeira
