Amy M. Lerner

Opinion: Urban resilience efforts must consider social and political forces

Environmental disasters, ranging from catastrophic floods to extreme temperatures, have caused more than 30,000 deaths per year and more than US

Growing buildings in corn fields: Urban expansion and the persistence of maize in the Toluca Metropolitan Area, Mexico

250–300 billion a year in economic losses, globally, between 1995 and 2015 (1). Improved infrastructure and planning for extreme events is essential in urban areas, where an increasingly greater fraction of the world’s inhabitants reside. In response, international governmental and private initiatives have placed the goal of resilience at the center stage of urban planning. [For example, The 100 Resilient Cities Initiative (www.100resilientcities.org/); the Global Covenant of Mayors (https://www.compactofmayors.org/globalcovenantofmayors/); and the recent UN Habitat III (https://habitat3.org/the-new-urban-agenda)]. In addition, scientific and policy communities alike now recognize the need for “safe-to-fail” infrastructural design, and the potential role of green and blue infrastructure in mediating hydrological and climatic risks in cities (2). Fig. 1. Improving urban resilience could help cities better cope with natural disasters, such as neighborhood flood events in Mexico City pictured here. Data source: Unidad Tormenta, Sistema de Aguas de la Ciudad de Mexico. Nevertheless, the social and political norms, values, rules, and relationships that undergird and structure the myriad decisions made by public and private actors—what we call “socio-political infrastructure”—are likely to be as influential in urban vulnerability dynamics as “hard” infrastructure and environmental management. Urban planning for enhanced resilience and sustainability is ultimately a complex social and political process. Socio-political infrastructure creates patterns of behavior and action that shape the built environment. Developing more sustainable pathways of urban development hinges on making this socio-political infrastructure transparent and legible in the tools and approaches available for risk management. We argue that sustainability science is in the position to create the tools, methods, and strategies to identify, represent, and communicate the significance of these social and political processes to decision makers at all levels. In doing so, we can help … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: Hallie.Eakin{at}asu.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Sustainable Cattle Ranching in Practice: Moving from Theory to Planning in Colombia’s Livestock Sector

Urban growth continues to rise globally, especially in and around small cities and peri-urban areas of the developing world. In Mexico, a culture of maize production still exists alongside rapid urban and industrial growth, which exemplifies a hybridized urban-rural landscape. This paper discusses a study of household land-use and livelihood strategies in the Toluca Metropolitan Area, west of Mexico City, a traditional maize-growing region that has experienced rapid urban growth. Logistic regression combined with ethnographic data illustrate that maize is being abandoned to some extent as producers age and non-farm income sources surge. At the same time, some maize still persists for tradition and security as non-farm income is often volatile. Our results reflect a persistence of maize in peri-urban areas of central Mexico, which should not be ignored by policy and planning.

Adaptation for Whom to What? Challenges and Opportunities in Agriculture-Urban Collaboration for Climate Change Adaptation

A growing population with increasing consumption of milk and dairy require more agricultural output in the coming years, which potentially competes with forests and other natural habitats. This issue is particularly salient in the tropics, where deforestation has traditionally generated cattle pastures and other commodity crops such as corn and soy. The purpose of this article is to review the concepts and discussion associated with reconciling food production and conservation, and in particular with regards to cattle production, including the concepts of land-sparing and land-sharing. We then present these concepts in the specific context of Colombia, where there are efforts to increase both cattle production and protect tropical forests, in order to discuss the potential for landscape planning for sustainable cattle production. We outline a national planning approach, which includes disaggregating the diverse cattle sector and production types, identifying biophysical, and economic opportunities and barriers for sustainable intensification in cattle ranching, and analyzing areas suitable for habitat restoration and conservation, in order to plan for both land-sparing and land-sharing strategies. This approach can be used in other contexts across the world where there is a need to incorporate cattle production into national goals for carbon sequestration and habitat restoration and conservation.

Correction for opinion: Urban resilience efforts must consider social and political forces (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (2017) 114 (186-189) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1620081114)

As leaders in climate change governance, urban governments have the opportunity to interact, coordinate, and collaborate with different sectors and actors to set and pursue both private and public adaptation goals. Urban and peri-urban agriculture (growing and raising food and non-food products within or at the periphery of an urban area) is recognized as both vulnerable to climate change and as a potential strategy for urban climate adaptation and mitigation. However, few cities have formally incorporated it into their climate change policies. Mexico City is one exception. It’s 2014–2020 Climate Action Plan—El Programa de Accion Climatica: Ciudad de Mexico (PACCM)—outlines actions and programs to benefit the city’s peri-urban agrarian communities and farmers. This chapter examines the PACCM to explore the drivers, obstacles, and opportunities of agriculture-urban collaboration for climate change adaptation. We examine: (1) how and why agriculture became part of the PACCM; (2) the stressors and vulnerabilities that the PACCM’s agrarian actions and programs seek to mitigate, for private and/or public benefit; and, (3) the barriers to and opportunities for this collaboration. We analyzed the PACCM programs that target agrarian actors, activities, and lands, and interviewed government officials, PACCM coordinators and authors, agrarian community leaders, and farmers about the Plan’s development and implementation. We found that the PACCM implicitly considers peri-urban agrarian actors as private providers of public adaptation benefits for the city, through measures intended to also benefit agrarian actors. However, the Plan does not articulate how agrarian actors and lands fit into the city’s larger vision for adaptation, nor does it adequately address the specific vulnerabilities and socioeconomic dynamics shaping agrarian actors’ decisions, which may undermine the Plan’s success. The results suggest several guidelines to promote the private provision of public adaptation in the context of social-ecological change. First, governments and private providers must explicitly communicate their needs and expectations for the collaboration so that the needs of both parties can be addressed during policy development. This also requires consideration of the effects of social, economic, and environmental changes on the private providers and beneficiaries. Secondly, to encourage private actors to provide specific public adaptation benefits, governments must develop policy mechanisms that explicitly and directly promote the desired benefits, ideally in collaboration with private providers. Finally, policy processes and outcomes that promote private provisioning of public adaptation benefits warrant close attention to how winners and losers, and synergies and trade-offs are mediated.

Training Sustainability Change Agents: Lessons from International Water Education

OPINION Correction for “Opinion: Urban resilience efforts must consider social and political forces,” by Hallie Eakin, Luis A. BojórquezTapia, Marco A. Janssen, Matei Georgescu, David ManuelNavarrete, Enrique R. Vivoni, Ana E. Escalante, Andres Baeza-Castro, M. Mazari-Hiriart, and Amy M. Lerner, which appeared in issue 2, January 10, 2017, of Proc Natl Acad Sci USA (114:186–189; 10.1073/pnas.1620081114). The authors note that the affiliation for Luis A. BojórquezTapia, Ana E. Escalante, M. Mazari-Hiriart, and Amy M. Lerner should instead appear as Laboratorio Nacional de Ciencias de la Sostenibilidad, Instituto de Ecología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City 04510, Mexico. The corrected author and affiliation lines appear below. The online version has been corrected.

Adaptive capacity in evolving peri-urban spaces: Responses to flood risk in the Upper Lerma River Valley, Mexico

Unsustainable socio-economic practices manifest prominently in water crises and water-related disasters. This turns water managers into prototypical sustainability professionals, and important change agents in a broader societal transformation towards sustainability. Water education is, de facto, sustainability education. By bridging the gap between a pedagogical and a professional view on required sustainability competencies, experiences with water education offer valuable insights in the context of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The paper reports on recent experiences with increasing the sustainability orientation of water education programmes, and explores key issues that require attention in ESD programmes in general. The experience of three international degree and capacity development programmes at the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) reveals lessons on learning environments and capacities essential to the design and implementation of training programmes in, for and about sustainable development. To guide ESD programme development in higher education, it proposes adopting a ‘learning and applying what we teach’ approach, with particular attention to: skill development for meaningful stakeholder engagement; normative and value-based aspects of sustainability education; and necessary organizational capacities and professional skills of educational providers.