Environmental injustices on green and blue infrastructure: Urban nexus in a macrometropolitan territory

Injustiças ambientais na infraestrutura verde e azul: nexos urbanos em um território macrometropolitano

ABSTRACT

Green-blue infrastructure in urban regions guarantees the provision of resources such as water, energy, and food, which are interdependent and fundamental in ensuring human development. In this study, we analyzed the environmental injustice issue relationships of the supply and production of water, energy, and food in the S~ao Paulo Macrometropolis, Brazil. Its 180 municipalities were compared and categorized into ‘losers’ and ‘winners’ based on the urban nexus approach, the proportion of green infrastructure, and human development. We applied a neural network self-organizing map to official publicly available data to obtain clusters of municipalities featuring combinations of 19 indicators. The results showed four clusters with three containing characteristics of receivers (Capital, Hinterland, and Developed Receivers) and one of providers, the latter aggregating municipalities with a strong role in providing water, food, and subsidies for energy generation. However, the providers also included the municipalities that had the greatest inequities in terms of human development and social inclusion. The importance of evaluating the co-benefits of green-blue infrastructure in urban spaces can serve as an adaptation strategy to both improve natural resource management and offer support to different processes and ecosystem functions. Our study provides a comprehensive understanding of complex urban systems by considering environmental justice and nexus synergies.

Keywords: Green-blue infrastructure (GBI), Ecosystem services (ES), Water-energy-food (WEF) nexus, Urban nexus, Environmental justice, Cluster analysis

RESUMO

A infraestrutura verde-azul em regiões urbanas garante o fornecimento de recursos como água, energia e alimentos, que são interdependentes e fundamentais para garantir o desenvolvimento humano. Neste estudo, analisamos as relações de injustiça ambiental entre o fornecimento e a produção de água, energia e alimentos na Macrometrópole Paulista, Brasil. Seus 180 municípios foram comparados e categorizados em “perdedores” e “vencedores” com base na abordagem do nexo urbano, na proporção de infraestrutura verde e no desenvolvimento humano. Aplicamos um mapa auto-organizado de rede neural a dados oficiais disponíveis publicamente para obter clusters de municípios apresentando combinações de 19 indicadores. Os resultados mostraram quatro clusters, sendo três contendo características de receptores (Capital, Interior e Receptores Desenvolvidos) e um de provedores, este último agregando municípios com forte papel no fornecimento de água, alimentos e subsídios para geração de energia. No entanto, os provedores também incluíram os municípios que apresentavam as maiores desigualdades em termos de desenvolvimento humano e inclusão social. A importância de avaliar os cobenefícios da infraestrutura verde-azul em espaços urbanos pode servir como uma estratégia de adaptação para aprimorar a gestão dos recursos naturais e oferecer suporte a diferentes processos e funções ecossistêmicas. Nosso estudo oferece uma compreensão abrangente de sistemas urbanos complexos, considerando a justiça ambiental e as sinergias de nexo.

Palavras-chave: Green-blue infrastructure (GBI), Ecosystem services (ES), Water-energy-food (WEF) nexus, Urban nexus, Environmental justice, Cluster analysis

Introduction

Achieving sustainability of urban systems is highly challenging because of the depletion of local natural resources and respective ecosystem services (ES), the role of urbanization, and global environmental changes (Filho et al., 2020; Langemeyer and Connolly, 2020; Seto et al., 2017). One of the consequences of urbanization, as described by Seto et al. (2017), is that ecosystem functions could be affected, such as food production, carbon sequestration, and losses of agricultural land. Furthermore, urbanization may affect the use of energy in buildings and technological improvements in energy efficiency.

A paradigm shift towards interdisciplinary knowledge about urban systems to increase resource efficiency and sustainability has occurred, encompassing concepts like ES (Escobedo et al., 2019; Langemeyer and Connolly, 2020; Romero-Duque et al., 2020), green-blue infrastructure (GBI) (Kati and Jari, 2016; Zhu et al., 2019), and the urban water-energy-food (WEF nexus hereafter) (Artioli et al., 2017; Gondhalekar and Ramsauer, 2017). Moreover, associated with issues of natural resource/ES provisioning, environmental justice-related problems have become especially acute in dense and complex urban areas (Andersson et al., 2019; Ernstson, 2013).

Conflicts and trade-offs related to the conservation of natural areas and alternatives for economic development have been well explored (Agrawal and Redford, 2009; Hansen et al., 2015), but a substantial knowledge gap still exists regarding wide, diverse, and demanding metropolitan areas. For those, the threat of unsustainable living is represented by significant asymmetries and a lack of integrated analysis of socio-environmental vulnerability and injustices among territories (Ajibade, 2019; Favaro et al., 2016; Mapar et al., 2017). In addition, studies on urban sustainability mainly center on the Global North, focusing on complex challenges of food systems and related constraints such as water and energy (Blay-Palmer et al., 2018; Keivani, 2010), however, in the very rapidly and unplanned urbanizing Global South such studies are even more essential to tackle global sustainability challenges (Yücel and Barlas, 2010).

In this study, we focus on the São Paulo Macrometropolis (SPM) and consider the different roles of its 180 municipalities in providing or receiving benefits of ES and human development. Since the 1950s, São Paulo state has been rapidly urbanizing with people migrating from all over the country to the richest and most developed urbanized region, resulting in peripheralization of poverty among the pertaining municipalities and resource constraints related to a lack of developed alternatives (Ferreira, 2011), the need to conserve GBI assets, and the demands and threats to the provision of ES (Favaro et al., 2016). Considering that there must be “losers” and “winners” (Middleton et al., 2015), we shed light on the constraints related to intermunicipal inequities, as they can easily be obfuscated in urban resilience and sustainability studies (Meerow and Newell, 2019; Zhang et al., 2019). Our hypothesis is that the macrometropolitan municipalities that have the highest proportions of GBI and ES provisioning in relation to their populations are also likely to register the lowest indicators of welfare and human development. Thus, in this article, we analyze environmental injustices related to the supply and production of water, energy, and food in the SPM, Brazil, and compare and categorize the different municipalities as ‘losers’ or ‘winners’ from the perspective of the urban nexus, GBI, and levels of human development.

Section snippets

Green-blue infrastructure and ecosystem services

The GBI has been defined as a combination of vegetation (green) and water bodies (blue) belonging to networks that associate natural and designed landscape components, such as forest reserves, urban parks, water bodies, green roofs, settlements, and canals (Ghofrani et al., 2017; Lamond and Everett, 2019; Well and Ludwig, 2019). This term emerged from a growing awareness of the need for a more integrated and systematic approach to managing urban GBI (Lamond and Everett, 2019). In turn, ES was

Study area

With nearly 34 million inhabitants distributed across 180 municipalities that occupy an area of 52,000 km² and account for approximately 28% of Brazil’s gross domestic product (GDP), the SPM was established based on the developmental flows and pressures of the extended metropolitan regions of São Paulo, Campinas, and Baixada Santista. The SPM features eight water resource management units (managed according to river basin boundaries), nearly 20,000 km² of vegetation cover, and a large network

Cluster identification

Fig. 2, Fig. 3 shows the clustering and the spatial configuration of the 180 SPM municipalities, respectively, within four clusters that are named below according to some of their remarkable characteristics (considering the aims of the study):

– Capital Receivers (influenced by São Paulo, capital city) – 16 (8.9%) municipalities with a total amount of 14.6 million inhabitants (43.3% of the SPM’s population). This cluster demonstrates a strong influence of the municipality of São Paulo (with the

SPM environmental injustice and GBI

The results of the clustering of all SPM municipalities using the self-organizing map technique verified that the observed data and the heterogeneity of the Providers cluster compared to the other clusters (Fig. 2; Table 2, Table 3) reveal environmental injustices based on the relationships established between the municipalities regarding the provisioning, flow, and access to water, energy, food, and human development. This finding supports our hypothesis that a high support of ES and green

Conclusions

Analyzing the presence of GBI and the provision of ES relative to the populations of the study area’s municipalities denotes environmental injustices in the studied urban system, thereby emphasizing intrinsic elements to consider in ensuring sustainable development. In principle, people in different municipalities have equivalent rights, but those who live in the providing municipalities supply the needs of their peers in the macrometropolitan system without being able to count on the same

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Mateus Henrique Amaral: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Writing – original draft, preparation. Lira Luz Benites-Lazaro: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Writing – original draft, preparation. Paulo Antonio de Almeida Sinisgalli: Writing – review & editing. Humberto Prates da Fonseca Alves: Data curation, Writing – review & editing. Leandro Luiz Giatti: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Supervision.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the financial support received from São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), Process nº 2015/03804–9. The authors also acknowledge the financial support received from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) (Process nº 309840/2018–0 and 131414/2018–6). Benites-Lazaro, L.L. acknowledges the financial support received from FAPESP Grant nº 2017/17796–3 and 2019/24479–0.

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