Assessing the ecological dimension of urban resilience and sustainability

ABSTRACT

We propose a framework for a package of Urban Sustainability and Resilience Indicators (USRI) based on a holistic approach to urban dynamics that we name the ‘pyramid of urban resilience and sustainability’. We start with a concise discussion of the concepts of urban resilience and sustainability, their synergies and trade-offs. We then make a point of the need for an interdisciplinary and holistic approach to assess progress towards or away from urban sustainability and resilience; and delineate an analytical framework that enables a comprehensive approach to ‘the urban’ by addressing not only ecological but also economic, sociocultural and governance dimensions. We critically reflect on its potential (and limits) by applying it to the case of Mexico City. The paper presents preliminary results for the ecological dimension of such a framework, and insights from the case of solid waste.

USRI offers the potential for a systemic approach to urban sustainability and resilience. Yet, some limitations are evident, mostly related to data availability at the urban level, complexity to aggregate and weight data, the limited efforts for knowledge coproduction and the incorporation of participatory processes, and the need to cautiously translate findings – and their inherent uncertainties – into decision-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban sustainability
• urban resilience
• urban planning
• urban indicators
• Mexico City

Acknowledgements

Part of this paper is an outcome of Delgado’s sabbatical research project on ‘Challenges and Opportunities for the Transformation to Sustainable and Resilient Urban Settlements’ supported by the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Sciences and Humanities of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (CEIICH-UNAM) and UNAM's PASPA-DGAPA program. The research project has been hosted by the University of California Santa Barbara (visiting research scholar) and the California Energy Commission (volunteer).. Another part of the paper corresponds to Guibrunet’s PhD field research carried out with the technical support of CEIICH-UNAM and a fellowship of the UCL ISR PhD programme on the Sustainable Use of Resources and the Environment. .

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.​

Notes

1. ‘Slum’ is defined, in the Millennium Development Goals, as a housing type which cumulates several of the following: lack of piped water, lack of sanitation, overcrowding and non-durable housing. See, www.un.org/millenniumgoals/environ.shtml.

2. Goal No. 11, see, http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org.

3. Hiremath et al. (2013) support this appraisal when they state that ‘most currently available urban assessment methods fail to demonstrate sufficient understanding of the interrelations and interdependencies of social, economic and environmental considerations’.

4. Some examples of indicators and indexes that offer a more complex approach of the urban than traditional ones are the 100 Resilient Cities Index pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation (www.100resilientcities.org); the Resilience Capacity Index of the University of California – Berkeley (http://brr.berkeley.edu/rci); the SDG Goal 11 Monitoring Framework (UNHABITAT 2016b); the so-called tree analysis of urban resource consumption (Saldivar-Sali 2010); the Global Climate Risk Index of German Watch (http://germanwatch.org/en/cri) or the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index (http://index.gain.org). Literature on ‘urban nexus’ includes studies on water–energy–carbon nexus (Howells et al. 2013; Nair et al. 2014); energy–water–food security nexus (FAO 2014); among other. ICLEI-GIZ-BMZ (2014) has made a review on different practical ‘nexus’ cases.

5. By informal waste handling generally (and recycling in particular), we mean those activities which are not regulated, controlled or monitored by any instance of government. This is in opposition to formal waste management activities carried out by government employees (such as garbage collectors) or private companies duly registered with the Ministry of the Environment.

6. We estimate this to be a conservative figure, considering that it does not include the waste collected during waste-picking activities outside governmental infrastructure (shown are ‘waste-picking at home’ and ‘waste-picking in the street’ in Figure 4).

7. The main ones are, at the national level, the General Law for Waste Prevention and Integral Management, as well as the Ministry of the Environment’s norms regulating waste management practices. At the urban level, the Law of Solid Waste (2003) is the document which sets the rules for urban waste governance, and particularly, the annual generation of a waste inventory and the periodic production of a Program for Integral Management of Solid Waste. Indirectly, the different climate documents (Law of Climate Change Mitigation, Adaptation and Sustainable Development, and the Climate Action Plan) also influence the waste strategy.

8. The main strategy to increase recycling is based on punctual government-run recycling schemes – such as running recycling barter events, or installing containers for old batteries and electronic waste (see SEDEMA 2015) – which currently represents 0.04% diversion from landfill (5 t/day, see Figure 5).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the PASPA – Dirección General de Asuntos del Personal Académico of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Notes on contributors

Gian Carlo Delgado-Ramos

Gian Carlo Delgado-Ramos is a full-time researcher at the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Sciences and Humanities, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), member, level II, of the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT). He received the 2014 Research Award from the Mexican Academy of Sciences for his work in Social Sciences Research. He was a lead author of the 5th Assessment Report of the IPCC (working Group III, Chapter 12).

Louise Guibrunet

Louise Guibrunet is a PhD student at the Institute for Sustainable Resources, University College London (United Kingdom), hosted at the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Sciences and Humanities (UNAM) for a research stay between September 2015 and June 2016.