Reducing vulnerability is the aim of flood risk management plans, yet their success depends on acceptance and implementation by their community. It is important, then, to study approaches that ...encourage societal participation in decision-making. The present study combined three participatory methods to capture and understand local knowledge on flood vulnerability reduction in a coastal town in southern Mexico. As a feasibility outcome, we found that these kinds of approaches involving community participation and consultation are attainable and easy to integrate into the local planning processes of vulnerability reduction and flood risk management. On process outcomes, we found that the community is aware of the flood risk given by their spatial location, has taken actions to adapt, and proposed other actions to reduce their vulnerability. We found no quantitative relationship between the levels of flood delimited by the participatory geographic information systems approach and the community’s socioeconomic characteristics obtained by the house survey. Still, qualitative analysis of the three methods revealed that the collective memory of experiencing a flood plays a significant role in the measures the population takes to adapt and reduce vulnerability.
•Community perceptions are essential to reduce vulnerability.•Community engagement allow an integrated vision in flood-risk reduction planning.•Participatory methods are attainable and could be used in different situations.•Complementarity of the methods allows to understand the local flood-risk knowledge.•Collective memory plays a significant role to adapt and reduce vulnerability.
In 2005, torrential rains associated with Hurricane Stan devastated farm systems in southern Mexico. We present a case study on the impacts of and responses to Hurricane Stan by coffee households in ...three communities in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, with the objective of illuminating the linkages between household vulnerability and resilience. We analyze data from 64 household surveys in a cluster analysis to link household impacts experienced to post-Stan adaptive responses and relate these results with landscape-level land-cover changes. The degree of livelihood change was most significant for land-constrained households whose specialization in coffee led to high exposure and sensitivity to Stan and little adaptive capacity. Across the sample, the role of coffee in livelihood strategies declined, as households sought land to secure subsistence needs and diversified economically after Stan. Nevertheless, livelihoods and landscape outcomes were not closely coupled, at least at the temporal and spatial scale of our analysis: We found no evidence of land-use change associated with farmers’ coping strategies. While households held strong attitudes regarding effective resource management for risk reduction, this knowledge does not necessarily translate into capacities to manage resilience at broader scales. We argue that policy interventions are needed to help materialize local strategies and knowledge on risk management, not only to allow individual survival but also to enhance resilience at local, community and landscape scales.
En la interfase ciudad-comunidades rurales del área metropolitana del Valle de Puebla se tienen establecidas siete áreas naturales protegidas periurbanas. El objetivo de esta investigación fue tener ...un diagnóstico exploratorio de su condición actual y de los factores que inciden en su pérdida territorial y deterioro ecológico. Estas áreas no están funcionando como estrategias de conservación debido a que carecen de una delimitación espacial precisa y de un plan de manejo, son desconocidas por la mayoría de los habitantes del área, carecen de un presupuesto para su gestión, hay venta de tierras y persisten las actividades productivas y extractivas.
In the city-rural communities interface of the Puebla Valley seven periurban protected natural areas have been established. The objective of this investigation was to have an exploratory diagnosis of their current status and of the factors that affect their territorial loss and its ecological deterioration. These areas are not functioning as conservation strategies, because they lack a precise spatial delimitation and a management plan, they are unknown to most of the inhabitants of the area, they lack a budget for their management, the sale of lands and the productive and extractive activities.
Reforestation programs have been proposed as a remedial measure to tackle deforestation and forest ecosystems degradation. Because one of the main constraints to the implementation of restoration ...practices is lack of funding, these programs need to be carefully planned to efficiently use the economic and human resources invested. In this study we present a geospatial decision-making tool to identify suitable areas for restoration. The overall approach entails (1) the use of the simple multiattribute rating technique (SMART) to identify and rank the attributes according to their importance for prioritizing areas for restoration and (2) the implementation of 0–1 integer programming to select the areas that maximize the environmental benefit. The approach is exemplified through a case study in central Mexico's mountainous state of Estado de México, encompassing an area just above 2 million ha. Specialists in different aspects of reforestation selected the following attributes to identify priority areas for reforestation: erosion, land use/land cover, position in the watershed, soil type, terrain slope, and precipitation. In total, 644,642 ha were classified under very high priority for reforestation. Of these, 17,059 ha were selected to maximize the environmental benefit without exceeding the available budget. The selected sites were mainly in the forested zones of steeply sloped mountains. Although the multiattribute decision analysis, the optimization model, and the spatial analysis were only loosely coupled, their combination proved to be an innovative and practical approach to systematically identify priority areas for reforestation on a yearly basis.
La producción científica y la política territorial en México se ha construido básicamente a partir de la dicotomía campo-ciudad. En consecuencia, los fenómenos periurbanos no han sido cla-ramente ...explicados y, las políticas dirigidas a estos espacios no son explícitas o diferenciadas. En ese sentido, este artículo busca aportar información panorámica del periurbano en México. Primeramente, se propone un método para la identificación del periurbano basado en el índice de entropía de Shannon que mide la heterogeneidad del uso del suelo. En un segundo tiempo, el estudio caracteriza el espacio periurbano a través de atributos demográficos, sociales y terri-toriales. Finalmente, el estudio identifica cuatro dimensiones sociodemográficas y territoriales del espacio periurbano: 1) polarización socio-ocupacional, 2) la oposición entre suelo natural y suelo para el cultivo, 3) urbanización como entorno construido y dinámica demográfica, y 4) marginación social e informalidad residencial. Estas dimensiones sugieren procesos simultáneos diferenciados en el espacio periurbano.
This remote sensing study compares growth occurring in three urban types between 2005 and 2014: peri-urban, rural and urban, in a fast-growing metropolitan region west of Mexico City. Future urban ...growth for the period 2014–24 is modelled using the land-use/cover change (LUCC) model Geomod. Urban expansion is correlated with some socio-territorial factors and the impacts are assessed for the loss of biomass. In both periods, the urban zone differed the most from the other two in terms of urban expansion. The Geomod predictions overestimate the urban expansion in the urban zone and underestimate it in the peri-urban and rural zones. Significant differences exist in the average urban expansion between zones. The main urban growth drivers were elevation, population density, distance to previous urban land and distance to roads. A substantial loss of biomass is due to urban growth, including expansion and infill. The research reveals significant differences in growth between peri-urban, rural and urban areas, and contributes spatial information for designing focused land-use policies in dynamic urban contexts.Policy relevanceThis article contributes to understanding the differentiated urban growth of urban, peri-urban and rural areas, which can translate into more precise and effective public policies. Urban expansion and infill patterns differ. For peri-urban and rural areas, the main growth is infill, so actions should be implemented to sustainably manage the vacant or undeveloped land within an existing human settlement to prevent further expansion, but also to avoid the loss of priority areas for the provision of ecosystem services. In urban areas where the main urban increment is expansion, sensible consolidation decisions need to be taken to avoid further urban expansion and the incorporation of urban green space.
El objetivo de este estudio fue analizar la vulnerabilidad, la capacidad de adaptación y el empoderamiento para enfrentar el cambio climático a través de la percepción de los habitantes en dos ...comunidades periurbanas expuestas a huracanes e inundaciones en La Paz, Baja California Sur, México. Desarrollamos talleres participativos en cada comunidad para obtener la percepción acerca de su exposición a cambios climáticos y la forma en que los han enfrentado. Ambas comunidades tuvieron la percepción de que ha habido un cambio en las condiciones climáticas a lo largo del año, indicando que ambas son conscientes de la variabilidad climática. La gente reconoció su vulnerabilidad a los cambios en el clima y la alta frecuencia de ciclones en la zona. Además, ellos identificaron las transformaciones económicas y las adaptaciones sociales que estos fenómenos han provocado, y reconocieron los impactos en la salud debidos a la proliferación de nuevas enfermedades. Esto nos permitió confirmar como las percepciones de los habitantes son fundamentales, no sólo para detectar la variabilidad climática, sino también para demostrar la importancia del conocimiento local para reducir la vulnerabilidad y mejorar la capacidad de adaptación y empoderamiento. Obtener información local de los impactos del clima para entender las causas sociales de la vulnerabilidad, la adaptación y el empoderamiento es un planeamiento novedoso en el análisis del cambio climático.
El suelo es uno de los principales recursos naturales, en el cual se sustentan los bosques y la producción de alimentos para una población que crece cada día. Contar con información actualizada ...sobre este recurso y su distribución facilita la planeación y clasificación de las actividades agropecuarias y de manejo de los bosques. La clasificación de suelos de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Agricultura y la Alimentación (FAO) denominada Base Referencial Mundial del Recurso Suelo (WRB), ha sido mejorada con ello se aumentó su precisión. Los objetivos de esta investigación fueron actualizar la clasificación de la cartografía del Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía escala 1:50,000 de los suelos del Estado de México de la clasificación FAO 1970, a la versión de suelos de la WRB 2006; además de cuantificar la superficie de las Unidades y Subunidades de sus suelos y delimitar su distribución. Los suelos dominantes en el estado son los Andosoles con 4,799.08 km2, Feozems con 4,727.18, Regosoles con 2,656.83, Vertisoles con 2,414.85 y Cambisoles con 1,960.47 km2. Se agregaron los Leptosoles que agruparon a los Rankers, Rendzinas y Litosoles; estos suelos se denominan como Leptosoles Líticos (LPli), los cuales cubren 1,749.68 km2 y tienen una profundidad menor a 10 cm. Con ello se reduce el área para la producción de cultivos.
Groundwater vulnerability mapping is increasingly being used to design aquifer protection and management strategies. This paper presents a dynamic visualization method to groundwater vulnerability ...mapping. This method—called V-DRASTIC—extends the capacities of DRASTIC, an overlay/index technique that has been applied worldwide to evaluate the condition of hydrogeological factors and determine groundwater vulnerability at regional scales. V-DRASTIC is based upon psychophysics’ principles (a theory that describes the people’s response to a stimulus) to generate alternative groundwater vulnerability categorization schemes. These are used as inputs in a fuzzy pattern recognition procedure to enable planners, decision makers and stakeholders identify which scheme conveys meaningful information regarding groundwater vulnerability across a territory. V-DRASTIC was applied in the groundwater vulnerability assessment of two urban watersheds in Mexico.
Land degradation mapping is a problem-solving task that aims to provide information for allocating budgets and materials to counter the deterioration of land resources. Typically, it entails the ...implementation of a set of indicators in a GIS to appraise the severity of land degradation across a territory. Nevertheless, the selection of these indicators has proved to be challenging in practice and often this selection reflects one particular and thus limited perspective of land degradation. Because land degradation is intrinsically complex and involves decisions by many agencies and individuals, land degradation mapping should be used as a learning tool through which managers, experts and stakeholders can re-examine their views within a wider semantic context. In this paper, we introduce an analytical framework, called Connotative Land Degradation Mapping, which aims to depict the meaning of a multiplicity of interacting drivers and effects The CLDM entails the implementation of (1) geographic information systems and multicriteria decision analysis (GIS-MCDA), and (2) geo-visualization. The approach is illustrated through a case study of two urban watersheds in central Mexico. Results showed that the main land degradation drivers in the study area were related to natural processes, which were exacerbated by human activities. The output of the CLDM enabled a better communication of the land degradation issues and concerns in a way relevant for policymakers.
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