Humberto Prates da Fonseca Alves’s research while affiliated with Federal University of São Paulo and other places

The contemporary scenario of climate variability imposes numerous challenges in the socio-environmental field. When measured in the Global South, socio-economic, and environmental inequalities become fundamental indicators for diagnoses and improving planning, decision-making, and public policy in urban spaces. Considering SPMM, inequalities are translated into large segments of the population living in socio-environmental vulnerability, given the precarious access to urban infrastructure and services, especially those related to water supply and basic sanitation. This precariousness of access becomes even more critical in the context of climate change—due to the disturbances already affecting the hydrological cycle—making the debate on the governance of environmental sanitation urgent. This text aims to review this debate regarding the identification, selection, and elaboration of indicators that have a compelling potential to establish the links between water, energy, food, waste, and socio-environmental vulnerability, enabling analysis and support decision-making that potentially could promote good governance and support SPMM to overcome its problematic reality.

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 São 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.

In this article, the concept of socio-environmental vulnerability is empirically operationalized, with the objective of analyzing situations of socio-environmental vulnerability on intra-urban scale, in a group of 62 municipalities in the three main metropolitan regions of the Macro-metropolis of São Paulo State. The methodology associates two concepts from the recent literature on vulnerability - one social and the other physical-environmental - through an index that integrates socio-demographic indicators from the 2010 Demographic Census with cartographies of areas susceptible to floods and landslides. The results show that 1.8 million people live in areas with high socio-environmental vulnerability that have significantly worse socioeconomic conditions than areas with low and moderate vulnerability, especially regarding the differences in sewage coverage, in the surroundings of households and in the population living in substandard settlements (slums).

O objetivo do artigo é fazer a identificação e análise espacial de situações de vulnerabilidade socioambiental em escala intraurbana no município de Guarulhos-SP, desenvolvendo uma operacionalização empírica do conceito de vulnerabilidade socioambiental, por meio da integração de indicadores sociodemográficos do Censo Demográfico 2010 com cartografias que representam áreas de risco ambiental. Os resultados revelam que determinadas áreas, espalhadas pelo território do município e onde vivem 119 mil pessoas, possuem alta vulnerabilidade socioambiental e apresentam condições socioeconômicas significativamente piores do que aquelas áreas com baixa e mesmo moderada vulnerabilidade. Portanto, os resultados do artigo podem fornecer subsídios para o planejamento de políticas públicas de mitigação das situações de vulnerabilidade socioambiental e de adaptação às mudanças climáticas, no município de Guarulhos, além de contribuir com o desenvolvimento de indicadores e metodologias para análise de situações de vulnerabilidade às mudanças climáticas, em áreas urbanas e metropolitanas do Brasil.