COS 91-5 - Sustainability improvement: ecological or social public policies? The case of a transnational watershed socioecosystem

Abstract: The Usumacinta River basin (URB), a 77k km² region shared by Guatemala and Mexico, constitutes a unique site in Mesoamerica for its natural and cultural diversity. URB is populated by 2.3 million people, experiencing high levels of poverty and developing activities such as agriculture and extensive livestock raising. These activities have resulted in deforestation and the consequent reduction in the provision of important ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration and climate regulation. To face this challenging reality, governmental agencies in both countries have implemented different public strategies focusing either on the protection of natural areas or the amelioration of the social conditions of the population. Here, following a socioenvironmental analysis approach, we developed a model describing the system associated with the URB and fed it with a system of sustainability indicators providing information on each of the components of the model. We analyzed the relations between indicators between and within model components and explored scenarios of improvement in public policy indicators. From the information gathered, we establish that the URB displays different degrees of sustainability in its components, with a relatively good state both in the indicators of its natural conditions and the processes derived from the human activities performed in the URB, a more sustainable territory in Mexico than in Guatemala, in their public policy, social and anthropogenic assets components, and an opposite pattern in the indicators of human activities in the territory. When exploring scenarios of improvement in the public policy indicators, we establish that an investment in the amelioration of the social conditions of the population, both in education and health, has an overall improvement in the sustainability of the entire socioecosystem, rather than policies focused on the natural component, which had null or even negative overall effects.