Climate-Environmental Governance in the Mexico Valley Metropolitan Area: Assessing Local Institutional Capacities in the Face of Current and Future Urban Metabolic Dynamics

Gian Carlo Delgado Ramos

doi:10.3390/world2010003

Abstract

This paper focuses on the evaluation of local institutional capacities for advancing climate-environmental governance in the Mexico Valley Metropolitan Area (MVMA). It starts with a brief contextualization of the MVMA, followed by an estimation of current and tendential urban inflows and outflows by 2050 with the objective of delineating the challenges and potential implications ahead. Next, an assessment of local climate-environmental institutional capacities is offered. For that, the methodology and main outcomes of the so-called ICI-CLIMA index is presented for 2019. A qualitative discussion continues in order to assert the challenges and opportunities for advancing a coordinated urban agenda for sustainability and resilience. Such discussion has been enriched with documental and other type of information gathered through field research in all of the 76 municipalities that comprise the MVMA. The paper concludes that, in addition to the limited current climate-environmental local capacities, there is a mismatch between them and both the level of climate vulnerability officially identified and the environmental challenges currently facing. Therefore, for coping with a tendential scenario of increasing urban inflows and outflows and their associated climate-environmental implications, MVMA governments will have to improve their capacities while advancing, at all levels of government, the coordination of climate-environmental agendas, and of the later with urban planning and development agendas.

Highlights

Mexico Valley Metropolitan Area (MVMA) encompasses 7866 km2 of administrative land and a population of 21 million inhabitants
Governed by 76 local municipalities of three different states—16 of Mexico City, 59 of the State of Mexico and one of Hidalgo—the MVMA has unceasingly expanded, mostly since the 1980s when built area expansion surpassed the rhythm of population growth
Despite generating around a quarter of Mexico’s Gross Domestic Product–GDP, the economic structure of the MVMA, mostly of services, it is among the 275 metropolitan areas of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that rank with the lowest per capita GDP, which in this case is of about sixteen thousand dollars yearly [2]

Summary

Introduction

Mexico Valley Metropolitan Area (MVMA) encompasses 7866 km of administrative land and a population of 21 million inhabitants (about 17% of the national population). 5% of the national GDP than what the MVMA currently does [2] Such type of constrained economic structure that characterizes the MVMA is in addition spatially uneven, as the per capita GDP is 3.7 times higher in Mexico City than in the remaining metropolitan area [2]. This spatial inequality, reinforced by urban speculation and sprawling [3,4], takes shape in terms of per capita GDP, and of population density (half of total MVMA population resides in only ten municipalities), housing supply, quality. Unequal urban growth has translated into an uneven spatial distribution of soaring environmental and health impacts associated to air, water, and soil pollution, a condition expected to aggravate within an environmental and climate changing context [5,6,7,8]

Current and Tendential Scenarios of the MVMA’s Urban Inflows and Outflows

Mexico’s urbanDomestic

ICI-CLIMA

2019 Findings

Conclusions