A new Socio-ecological Integrated Analysis for Agricultural Land Use Planning in Metropolitan AreasApplications for Tropical (Cali, Colombia) and Mediterranean (Barcelona, Spain) Biocultural Landscapes

Abstract

The exponential growth of the world's human population over the past 100 years has accentuated the world's social metabolism at an unprecedented rate. According to the United Nations, in the next 30 years, the human population will reach 9.8 billion people. At that same point, 68% of the world population will live in metropolitan regions. This trend will inevitably increase the demand for food, raw materials, and energy to support the world's demand, anticipating the unsustainability of our current and predominant social metabolism. Interesting scenarios that exemplify the situation mentioned above are metropolitan regions. These territories face a double challenge: sustainably satisfy their population's biophysical (i.e., food and material) and energy needs while maintaining the ecological structure and functionality of their territories, and lessening their vulnerability to climate change, food insecurity and disease outbreaks. Many of the metropolitan areas of the world are surrounded by rural and peri-urban agricultural land. Although agriculture has been the basis of subsistence for our societies, providing us with food, raw materials, and energy for millennia, current agricultural systems have reached a critical transition point in their performance, environmental impacts, and energy patterns, affecting local, regional, and global sustainability. As socio-ecological systems, metropolitan areas hold complex urban-rural and nature-society interactions, occurring at different scales (i.e., local, landscape, regional) and dimensions (i.e., social, economic, ecological, cultural). Despite the pivotal role of agricultural expansion and intensification, and unplanned urban growth on global sustainability, tackling these issues stills represents a great methodological and conceptual challenge for scientists, land planners, and policymakers. Focused on the experience of two contrasting metropolis: Barcelona (Spain) and Cali (Colombia), this thesis presents integrative landscape-metabolism tools to assess the role of agriculture on the sustainability of the metropolitan socioecological system. The thesis discusses the potential role, implications, and contributions of different agroecosystems for land planning in regions where economic growth and demographic dynamics are in a complex interplay with sociocultural and ecological process fundamental for their long-term sustainability. The thesis encompasses four original research chapters, two developed in Cali and two in Barcelona. The first two chapters discuss the importance of approaching Cali's metropolitan development from a regional perspective, both geographically and culturally. It describes the importance of traditional smallholder agriculture in the configuration of agricultural mosaics, key for ecosystem services provision, but also the protection of rural livelihoods and culture. They conclude with a series of specific land planning recommendations for local authorities. The second part of the thesis focused on Barcelona Metropolitan Area. It takes a step forward on the multidimensional assessment of the AMB's green infrastructure, with a particular focus on the agricultural spaces. The work is part of a collaboration with the Urban Master Plan of Barcelona in the elaboration of the strategic environmental evaluation. It aims to assess different land planning and agricultural management scenarios with a Socio-ecological Integrated Analysis. The last chapter presents the application of the land planning and agricultural management modelled scenarios to a land-use optimization tool that aims to contribute to the understanding and development a new paradigm for metropolitan agriculture.