Abstract
The “Valles Cruceños” rural region plays a fundamental role for securing food and other resources for the neighboring, and fast sprawling, city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia). Due to the increasing pressure on its natural resources, the region is affected by progressive and severe environmental degradation, as many other rural regions in South and Central America. In this situation, sound policies and governance for sustainable land management are weak and not supported by data and scientific research outputs. With the present study, we aim at developing a novel and practical integrated hazard analysis methodology, supporting the evidence-based understanding of hazard patterns and informing risk assessment processes in the urban-rural continuum. Firstly, the main environmental hazards affecting the area were identified via questionnaire campaigns, held by the staff of local municipalities. Focusing on the hazards mostly perceived by the inhabitants of the region, including deforestation, water pollution and precipitation changes, hazard maps were created by using multiple environmental hazards indicators. An integrated hazard map was then built in a GIS environment, after a pair-wise comparison process. The maps represent a first baseline for the analysis of the present status of natural resources in “Valles Cruceños” area, and the proposed approach can be scaled up for integrated environmental hazards analysis in similar areas of Latin America.
Highlights
Anthropogenic environmental hazards represent an issue of major concern in Latin America as related to the potential effects of climate change on human activities and vice-versa
Vallegrande airport station is found to have an RMSE-observations standard deviation ratio (RSR) index of 0.5. This latter result is driven by the fact that Vallegrande is one of the Bolivian stations used for generating the CHIRPS dataset [40]
Elevated hazard map (Hp) shift values were found in the northern part of the “Valles Cruceños” region where the Amborò
Summary
Anthropogenic environmental hazards represent an issue of major concern in Latin America as related to the potential effects of climate change on human activities and vice-versa. Significant agriculture expansion can only take place over the tropical forests of South America, Africa and Southeast Asia, and over the boreal forests of Canada and Russia [1]. In South America, and, in particular, in the Amazon basin, in the last 40 years the deforestation occurring in tropical forests has reached an area of 650,000 km (equal to 18% of the total forested area), due to the expansion of agriculture, mainly for soybean (Glycine max) plantations [2,3]. The abrupt changes in vegetation cover due to deforestation reduce evapotranspiration, key for climate regulation thanks to water vapor fluxes into the atmosphere throughout the year [6,7]. Public Health 2019, 16, 2107; doi:10.3390/ijerph16122107 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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