Priorização de áreas para aplicação de políticas de pagamento por serviços ambientais em Belo Horizonte

Abstract

The challenge of conciling urban-environmental policies gives rise to the concept of sustainable urban development, which translates into the pursuit of more resilient, sustainable, and less unequal cities. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005 consolidates the perception that nature generates benefits for human well-being, known as Ecosystem Services (ES). As nature is part of urban life and cities are ecosystems, albeit greatly altered, there is also supply and consumption of these services in urban centers. Latin America is where the cities with the highest levels of inequality are found, which, perpetuating the logic of capital, organize themselves in a way that makes it explicit in their territory. Thus, the contributions of nature to people are not distributed fairly in the urban fabric. The enactment of the National Policy on Payment for Environmental Services highlights the need to develop strategies for implementing environmental preservation policies through incentives (financial or otherwise). However, in the current socio-environmental inequality scenario in the country, it is essential that such strategies be elaborated in such a way as not to reinforce it, by, for example, allocating resources to people and regions well-served by ES and failing to direct them to areas of extreme need. Using Belo Horizonte as a case study, this work aims to map, based on secondary data and environmental proxies, the supply of ES in the municipality and, based on georeferenced socio-economic data, the demand for actions that generate and enhance these benefits. Supply and demand were compared to compose a prioritization model, using methods of spatial analysis and exploratory analysis.