Urban environmental inequalities in Latin America: A scoping review

Abstract

Latin America is among the most urbanized regions in the world. However, cities in this region usually present an uneven distribution of environmental amenities and hazards between socioeconomic sectors, translating into prevalent issues of environmental inequalities. Urban environmental inequalities have been widely covered by studies from developed regions, but less attention has been placed on highly urbanized regions from the developing world. In this work, we review the topic of urban environmental inequalities in Latin America, aiming to identify the temporal and geographical trends of published research, and revise the main themes framing the research on environmental inequalities in this region. We searched for literature in three databases (i.e. Scielo, Scopus, Web of Science) using three different languages (i.e. English, Spanish, Portuguese). We identified a total of 57 articles published on the topic. These articles show an increasing rate of publication and citations during the last decade, with increasing proportion of papers published in English in journals covered by international databases. There is a large geographical bias towards a few countries and cities, and more than half of Latin-American countries have no research on this topic yet. While in North America race and ethnicity have been often associated to urban environmental inequalities, in Latin America most of studies relate environmental inequalities to social and economic variables. These results highlight the relevance of carrying out this type of research in developing regions, as these may provide key novel insights for generating better solutions to address urban environmental inequalities.