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A world of healthy people living in healthy ecosystems has proven to be an elusive goal of the sustainable development agenda. Numerous science-based assessments agree on the fundamental interdependence between people's health, the economy, and the environment, and on the urgency for more determined and concerted action based on multi-sector participatory approaches at the global and local levels. For knowledge to be policy-relevant and capable of contributing to healthy and sustainable development, it must take into account the dynamic and complex interactions between ecological and social systems (systems thinking), and it must be linked to development actions. This in turn requires greater interaction and exchange between decision-makers, researchers and civil society (a multi-stakeholder participatory process); and the harnessing of different disciplines and of different kinds of knowledge (a transdisciplinary approach). Ecosystem approaches to human health (ecohealth) link these elements in an adaptable framework for research and action. This paper presents an overview of ecohealth research approaches applied to vector-borne diseases, with particular attention to multi-stakeholder participation given its prominence in the sustainable development policy discourse.Um mundo de pessoas saudáveis em ecossistemas saudáveis tem sido uma meta elusiva da agenda de desenvolvimento sustentável. Inúmeras avaliações de bases científicas concordam com a interdependência fundamental entre saúde, economia e ambiente e, com a urgência de melhores determinações e orquestração de ações baseadas em enfoques participativos multissetoriais em níveis local e global. Para tornar o conhecimento relevante para fundamentar políticas públicas direcionadas para o desenvolvimento sustentável e saudável é necessário considerar as interações complexas e dinâmicas entre sistemas ecológicos e sociais (enfoque sistêmico), que devem estar ligadas às ações de desenvolvimento. Isso requer maior interação entre tomadores(as) de decisões, pesquisadores(as) e representantes da sociedade civil - um processo participativo com múltiplos atores, e a integração de diferentes disciplinas e de diferentes tipos de conhecimento em um enfoque transdisciplinar. Enfoques ecossistêmicos para saúde humana (ecossaúde) conecta esses elementos em um esquema adaptável para pesquisa e ação. Este artigo apresenta exemplos de pesquisas com enfoque em ecossaúde aplicadas às enfermidades transmitidas por vetores, com atenção particular à participação de múltiplos atores, considerando a proeminência desta prerrogativa no discurso político de desenvolvimento sustentável.

Segregation indices are today well known and increasingly used in urban studies. However, in the absence of specialized computer tools, calculating segregation indices soon becomes a long and complicated process. The odd free applications designed to calculate indices are implemented in geographic information systems (ArcInfo, ArcView and MapInfo). Users wishing to calculate indices by way of these applications must have the GIS software that contains the application and also a sufficient understanding of how to use geographic information systems—two conditions that can limit the use and correspondingly, broad access to residential segregation indices. To remedy this situation, we propose an independent and free application developed in C#.Net called Segregation Analyzer that allows some forty segregation indices (unigroup, intergroup, and multigroup) to be calculated quickly and easily, regardless of the data or city being studied. This application can be downloaded free of charge from the Spatial Analysis and Regional Economics Laboratory —SAREL— Web site (http://laser.ucs.inrs.ca/EN/Download.html).

The Mouth of the Amazon River, considered to be the largest river on Earth, is a geomorphological macro-frontier between two coastal blocks : the Guiana Shield coastal fringe (from Amapa to Venezuela) and the Para/Maranhao block (North Brazil). It also constitutes a vast geological domain that links the Amapa Platform, the Marajo Basin and the Para/Maranhao Platform. This Paper brings a synthetic view on this coastal compartment. It refers to a large number of multidisciplinary scientific results, and to remote sensing breakthroughs in environmental monitoring. The main purpose of the Paper is to enlight the role of the Mouth as a threshold in regional and local dinamics and processes. The geomorphological analysis relies on a taxonomy of facts and on dialectics between types and individuals. Final considerations are focused on environmental indicators and on current trends in coastal evolution in the Amazon.Warning : this text constitutes the first Part of the Paper. The second Part of the Paper will be published in the next volume of CONFINS.

The Mouth of the Amazon River, considered to be the largest river on Earth, is a geomorphological macro-frontier between two coastal blocks : the Guiana Shield coastal plain (from Amapa to Venezuela) and the North Brazil block (Pará/Maranhão). It also constitutes a vast geological domain that links the Amapa Platform, the Marajo Basin and the Pará/Maranhão Platform. This Paper brings a synthetic view on this coastal compartment. It refers to a large number of multidisciplinary scientific results, and to remote sensing breakthroughs in environmental monitoring. The main purpose of the Paper is to enlight the role of the Mouth as a threshold in regional and local dinamics and processes. The geomorphological analysis relies on a taxonomy of facts and on dialectics between types and individuals. Final considerations are focused on environmental indicators and on current trends in coastal evolution in the Amazon.

Journalism’s “Invisibles”Introduction

Os invisíveis do jornalismoIntrodução

Les invisibles du journalismeIntroduction

"Américanité," as a concept developed and refined by literary scholars to address a certain Québécois interest in writing and film, is paralleled here by the Brazilian concept "americanidade." Both evoke the "americanness" of contemporary writing in the Americas, and imply a turning away from European models and requirements toward a hybridization and a focus on movement, inter-relations, trans-cultural contacts. Translation, by definition a transcultural activity, moves these "american" texts from one language to another. In this article we study the translation of an archetypical novel of Quebec "américanité", Jacques Godbout's Une histoire américaine (1986) into Brazilian Portuguese. We examine the concepts of américanité and americanidade and hypothesize that such shared americanness will aid in the translation, or at least be recognized as the text moves from French to Portuguese. We examine the outcome of the translation from this particular perspective, and conclude that Europe in fact still intervenes as the major reference.