Luis Antonio Bojórquez-Tapia

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México | UNAM · Laboratorio Nacional de Ciencias de la Sostenibilidad

Large-scale infrastructure plays instrumental roles in defining trajectories of land use, influencing the distribution of risk, and enabling or eroding ecological and social wellbeing. While considerable attention has been paid to the outcomes and implications of such infrastructure investments, less analytical attention has been given to the decis...

One major challenge of social impact assessment concerns the implementation of multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) to ascertain the vulnerability of households to environmental change. While MCDA has been widely used to combine vulnerability indicators into an aggregated vulnerability score, the sensitivity of vulnerability indices to uncertain...

Capacity building is defined as a process by which stakeholders increase their knowledge, skills and resources in order to improve their ability to adapt in a fast-changing world. Universities play a key role in the promotion of sustainability and implementation of the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through capacity buildi...

La planeación espacial marina en México se materializa a través del ordenamiento ecológico, un instrumento de política ambiental transversal y participativo. A través de este instrumento, el gobierno busca fortalecer la coordinación entre autoridades y sociedad para subsanar las consecuencias negativas de la planeación sectorizada en distintas depe...

The fishing bycatch of the loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta) epitomizes the challenges of designing fisheries management strategies to protect highly migratory, endangered species. We present here the case of turtle bycatch in the Gulf of Ulloa, Mexico, in which conservation advocacy groups requested the United States Government to apply the...

Transdisciplinarity (TD) is now recognized as one of several core approaches to sustainability science. Efforts over the last decade have led to the conceptualization of transdisciplinary endeavors and the definition of practices that define the fundamental ambition and aspiration of TD. Nevertheless, while the principles defining transdisciplinary...

Marine spatial planning (MSP) has been defined as a collaborative process concerning the use of marine resources and space. It entails the translation and synthesis of the involved sectoral interests into a common language to enable the co-production of knowledge amongst the stakeholders. Ideally, MSP allows a common understanding of the socio-ecol...

The article “Expressions of collective grievance as a feedback in multi-actor adaptation to water risks in Mexico City”, written by Hallie Eakin, Rebecca Shelton, Andrés Baeza, Luis A. Bojórquez-Tapia, Shalae Flores, Jagadish Parajuli, Ileana Grave, Alejandra Estrada Barón, Bertha Hernández, was originally published electronically on the publisher’...

Effective adaptation assumes a feedback between the experience or anticipation of harm, and the actions of those individuals whose decisions and actions are necessary to reduce that harm. In urban areas, citizens often expect support from the public sector to facilitate their adaptation efforts and to protect them from exposure. This expectation—gr...

Cities are far more than the people who reside within them, the activities that drive urban dynamism, and hard and soft infrastructure that create urban structure and form. Cities are also composed of stories–narratives–that emerge from the experiences, ideas, knowledge and agendas of urban residents, administrators, and individuals with stakes in...

Policy-making to protect threatened species implies dealing with uncertainty and ignorance. Conservation management of the Eastern gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) population through the regulation of whale watching in the lagoon Ojo de Liebre, Mexico, is a useful example of policy-making challenged by lack of scientific knowledge regarding the n...

Urban adaptation to climate change is likely to emerge from the responses of residents, authorities, and infrastructure providers to the impact of flooding, water scarcity, and other climate-related hazards. These responses are, in part, modulated by political relationships under cultural norms that dominate the institutional and collective decisio...

We present here MEGADAPT (MEGAcity-ADAPTation), a hybrid, dynamic, spatially-explicit, integrated modeling approach to simulate the vulnerability of urban coupled socio-environmental systems – in our case, the vulnerability of Mexico City to socio-hydrological risk. Although vulnerability is widely understood to be influenced by human decision-maki...

Due to unplanned growth, large extension and limited resources, most megacities in the developing world are vulnerable to hydrological hazards and infectious diseases caused by waterborne pathogens. Here we aim to elucidate the extent of the relation between the spatial heterogeneity of physical and socio-economic factors associated with hydrologic...

Incidental fishing bycatch of loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) epitomizes the type of wicked problems increasingly faced by authorities, scientists, and stakeholders around the world. Successfully tackling wicked problems requires the implementation of approaches such as “continual engagement” to enable dialogue and collaboration amongst th...

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.

A promising approach for addressing sustainability problems is to recognize the unique conditions of a particular place, such as problem features and solution capabilities, and adopt and adapt solutions developed at other places around the world. Therefore, research and teaching in international networks becomes critical, as it allows for accelerat...

Adaptation is typically conceived uniquely in positive terms, however for some populations, investments in risk management can entail significant tradeoffs. Here we discuss the burden for households of coping with, and adapting to, adverse water conditions in economically marginal areas of Mexico City. We argue that households’ efforts to adapt in...

Purpose The authors describe the challenges and opportunities associated with developing an interdisciplinary sustainability programme in an emerging economy and illustrate how these are addressed through the approach taken for the development of the first postgraduate programme (MSc and PhD) in sustainability science at the National Autonomous Uni...

Transparency and reproducibility remain chal- lenges for sustainability assessment, particularly in devel- oping world contexts where formal scientific information is often limited. We posit that even in such contexts, sus- tainability assessment can be productive and informative if the underlying assumptions about sustainability are made transpare...

De acuerdo con un exhaustivo análisis de la Manifestación de Impacto Ambiental (MIA) del proyecto “Autopista Urbana Oriente. Tramo Muyuguarda-Bilbao” se concluye que de realizarse la obra se violarían al menos seis elementos normativos y de planificación vigentes en la zona de estudio: Programa de Manejo del ANP, Plan Rector de las Áreas Naturales...

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 indica...

El impacto de la minería a cielo abierto sobre los ecosistemas, sus suelos, mantos acuíferos, diversidad biológica y servicios ecosistémicos está ampliamente documentado en la literatura científica con base en evaluaciones de múltiples sitios en todo el mundo. Como se describe en el presente documento, el proyecto “Caballo Blanco” carece de evidenc...

Case studies and analyses investigate how collaborative response to crisis can enhance social-ecological resilience and promote community reinvention. Crisis—whether natural disaster, technological failure, economic collapse, or shocking acts of violence—can offer opportunities for collaboration, consensus building, and transformative social change...

Communities who rely directly on the natural environment for their survival typically have developed risk management strategies to enable them to avoid dangerous thresholds of change to their livelihoods. Development policy appropriate for natural resource-based communities requires an understanding of the primary drivers of social-ecological chang...

Regional environmental assessments aim to synthesize the complex dynamics of socioenvironmental systems to facilitate sustainable policymaking. Theoretically, these assessments serve as ‘boundary objects’ that link scientific knowledge and policy making within a multiagency context. Nevertheless, achieving a boundary object is challenging becau...

Cozumel Island, Mexico, harbours two endemic species of dwarf procyonids: the Pygmy Raccoon Procyon pygmaeus and the Dwarf Coati Nasua nelsoni. Both species are Critically Endangered, and are among the world’s most threatened Carnivora. Here we summarise the research we have been conducting on their ecology, evolution, genetics, and conservation. W...

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 condi...

Coffee has been and still remains one of the most important commodities of the Mesoamerican region. Guatemala, Mexico, Costa Rica and El Salvador are among the top ten largest coffee exports in the world. Nevertheless, the social and economic upheaval that characterized the coffee sector has prompted the need for coordinated regional assessments of...

Vulnerability is a multidimensional concept associated with high uncertainty in measurement and classification. Developing a vulnerability index from the diverse and often incommensurate data that form the basis of vulnerability assessments is often a core challenge of vulnerability research. Problematically, many vulnerability indices are based on...

This study was based on a groundwater vulnerability assessment approach implemented for the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (MCMA). The approach is based on a fuzzy multi-criteria procedure integrated in a geographic information system. The approach combined the potential contaminant sources with the permeability of geological materials. Initially, c...

Multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) increasingly is being applied in environmental impact assessment (EIA). In this article, two MCDA techniques, stochastic analytic hierarchy process and compromise programming, are combined to ascertain the environmental impacts of and to rank two alternative sites for Mexico City's new airport. Extensive sensi...

Nature reserves can be considered a land-use category that competes with other land-uses for territory. Therefore, one fundamental goal in conservation planning is to arrive at nature reserve designs that protect the most valuable lands for conservation, and avoid the inclusion of tracts of land valuable for other stakeholders. However, the complex...

Expert consultation has been used to fill the information gaps that hamper conservation planning and nature reserve design. The use of expert knowledge in conservation planning is difficult, however, because it is subjective, biased, and value-laden. Decision theory provides a systematic and comprehensive means for addressing experts' subjective -...

Degradation of the oyamel fir-pine forest ecosystem in central Mexico is a threat to the overwintering and migratory phenomenon of the eastern North American population of the monarch butterfly ( Danaus plexippus). Because a lack of quantitative data has hindered effective conservation policy, we photogrammatically analyzed the changing state of a...

Appraisal of ecological impacts has been problematic because of the behavior of ecological system and the responses of these systems to human intervention are far from fully understood. While it has been relatively easy to itemize the potential ecological impacts, it has been difficult to arrive at accurate predictions of how these impacts affect p...

The objective of this paper is to present a GIS-based multivariate application for land suitability assessment with a public participation base. The approach takes into account the issues and concerns of the stakeholders, and employs a multivariate statistical procedure for classifying land units into land suitability groups, according to sectoral...

Since seventy percent of the water for domestic, industrial and agricultural use in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area (MCMA) derives from aquifer systems located within the Basin of Mexico, it is important to determine the sources of pollutants that may affect water quality. A spatial analysis of the main sources of groundwater pollution was carrie...

El 70% del agua que se utiliza en la Zona Metropoiitana de la Ciudad de México (ZMCM) destinado al uso doméstico industrial v agrícola, proviene de los sistemas de acuiferos de la Cuenca de México, por lo que es imooriante conocer las fuentes de contaminación que pueden influir en la calidad del recurso. En este estudio se realiza un análisis espec...

An approach is presented for evaluating the contents of environmental impact statements (EISs) for decision-making. This approach is presented through the review of a set of EISs of highway projects in Mexico. Since the highway projects were already approved, the basic premises of the study were that the EISs were accurate and comprehensive, and if...

Interaction matrices are widely used in environmental impact assessments (EIAs). However, this technique is considered an illustrative approach, since its analytical power is deemed to be insufficient for effectively handling complex decision-making. It can be argued that the misuse of interaction matrices has (in some instances) contributed to fla...

This paper is concerned with developing a model for group decision making under multiple criteria. The multiple criteria group decision making (MCGDM)problem involves a set of feasible land use patterns that are evaluated on the basis of multiple, conflicting and noncommensurate criteria by a group of individuals. The model integrates the Analytic...

Environmental protection agencies must administer and monitor compliance with environmental legislation and regulations, provide information to educate the public on the importance of environmental issues, and support the negotiation of environmental conflicts between socio-economic sectors. To perform these activities at the regional level require...

The different geoforms of the coastal zone are consecuence of environmental changes (hydrology, climate, marine hydrodynamic and organic growth). The coastal plain of Nayarit is an example of the confluence of these factors which result in saltmarshes, lagoons, deltas, meanders, channels, swamps, all of which are bordered by high mangrove density....

Environmental assessments of regional development projects have been used in Mexico to determine where conflicts between conservation of biodiversity and resource extraction are likely to occur. Species-rich areas have been acknowledged as a priority for conservation. However, biological information is incomplete and biased toward accessible sites,...

An important goal of biological inventories is to provide information for environmental assessments of development projects and biodiversity conservation. Likewise, computer data bases have been proposed for efficient compilation and management of biological information. However, the attributes of biological inventories and computer data bases have...

Mexican environmental legislation mandates public participation in regional development planning, so sectoral interests must be taken into account. A multivariate statistical procedure is presented for classifying land units into suitability groups, according to sectoral interests. This method provides information that is both legally defensible an...

Mexico is currently applying policies to encourage economic recovery. As part of these policies, developmental projects are being planned and implemented. These are expected to trigger regional development. Multinational Development Banks play an important role in financing the projects. In an attempt to avoid or minimize negative effects of develo...

The current Mexican environmental law provides the legal basis for comprehensive land-use planning. Under the law, development of natural ecosystems must combine goals, policies, and practices towards the sustainable use of natural resources and the protection of biological diversity. Thus, ecosystem manipulation must be able to counter fragmentati...

Utilizing source data for annual herbage production which had been obtained through repeated measurements, though not necessarily taken in each year, in 2 Arizona ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests from 1959 to 1980, 18 herbage production-forest overstory regression equations were developed and statistically analyzed. In addition to logarithm...

Forest projects include basic studies of environmental impacts and integrated forest management. However, there is confusion evident in the approach to their application in planning. This project clarifies the research of those studies in forest development and environmental protection planning. -English summary

Most forest wildfires in Mexico are related to human activities. A new strategy, implemented since 1984, includes use of modern technology, and of alternative natural resource management schemes. -from Author

Forest development should be planned with a base in ecological order that permits preserving the natural environment. Biodiversity analysis supports ecological order since, through this, it is possible to identify suitable areas for forest improvements and areas for bioconservation. -English summary

Most environmental impact assessments in Mexico are short-duration studies that tend to be descriptive rather than analytical and predictive. Therefore, a general methodology has been developed for the prediction and communication of ecological impacts in situations where time, funds, and information are major limitations. The approach] involves tw...

Thesis (Ph. D. - Renewable Natural Resources)--University of Arizona, 1987. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 175-187).