Latin America: one of the most unequal regions in environmental terms

The region is a major focus of environmental inequality, however, little is known about this in the rest of the world, as a result of language barriers and the lack of Latin American networks related to the subject, as discovered by Ignacio Fernández, an academic at the Faculty of Liberal Arts of the Adolfo Ibáñez University (UAI), in his research “Urban environmental inequalities in Latin America: a scope review”.

Millaray Mariqueo, Science in Chile.- Latin America is one of the most urbanized regions in the world, with more than 80% of its population living in urban areas. However, it also has very high levels of segregation, a reason that led Ignacio Fernández to inquire about the research carried out on this subject.

Ignacio has a PhD in Sustainability and has been addressing issues related to environmental inequality for 10 years, for the same reason, he considers that being South America the most urbanized region in the world, there are not many studies on it, generating an abyss of valuable information for decision-making. .

As a result of this, Ignacio together with Thomas Koplow-Villavicencio and Claudia Montoya-Tangarife, developed the research “Urban environmental inequalities in Latin America: an exploratory review”, with the aim of knowing if this topic is really being studied, since when, how and where these investigations are being published so that people know about them.

Urban environmental inequalities in Latin America

The objective of this article is to understand the status of this topic in Latin America and to find those relevant articles that have gone unnoticed due to the language barrier, and that, therefore, are not known by American or European scientists.

The study considered the search for publications in Spanish, English and Portuguese, where more than 200 articles were found that were carefully analyzed to integrate them into the final list, which is made up of 57 elements, “this study rescues from the trunk super important research that is published in Spanish in local magazines, with little international arrival but which are super powerful, making them now present in a free article in an international magazine in English, World Development SustainabilityTherefore, if someone from the United States searches for environmental inequalities, this will appear and they will have access to the list of all the articles described in the review”, mentions the UAI researcher.

Geographic bias and inequality factors

Within the study, Fernández comments that the largest amount of research on the subject came from Brazil, Mexico and Chile. In the case of the first two countries, it has to do with the fact that they have the most populated cities and therefore, it is related to research development on this topic; however, the case of Chile is different.

Our country has a smaller population, however, it concentrates a significant percentage of publications, Ignacio mentions that it has to do with the fact that in Chile inequalities have been a topic for a long time, and these have been transferred to the environmental topic, both from the sphere politics as well as from the general public. “I believe that the green area, the vegetation and environmental things are important issues in Chile, people are aware of things that are much closer, in things that interact with their immediate daily life.”

On the other hand, according to the results of the study, the socioeconomic level is the one that plays a greater role in urban environmental inequalities in Latin America, unlike the United States, where it has more to do with a racial issue.

“It is a cultural way of looking at inequality, in the United States inequality is seen based on race, because there is a racial issue where immigrants of African-American origin have been the ones who have less access to opportunities and therefore, are the ones who are in the lower socioeconomic strata, on the other hand, in Latin America we have not been able to recognize that we are also super discriminatory in terms of race, so we feel more discriminatory in terms of economic income”.

Lack of communication between Latin American scientists

Ignacio is currently doing an analysis of 50 Latin American cities to see the distribution of land cover, with the aim of distinguishing environmental inequality at a more objective level, “this is super important because a city that has very little vegetation is little functional in ecological terms and, therefore, the people there are perhaps going to live worse off”.

However, the scientist mentions that one of the main problems to advance in the development of research in Latin America is the lack of communication between scientists from different countries who work on this topic, since there are no important international associations related to the urban ecology “we are independent people who work in groups in certain countries, but there is a lot of connection missing and that connection is super important, because it will allow students at universities throughout Latin America to develop this topic and do theses in their own countries, reducing bias What is there regarding these three nations with more studies”.

In addition, the researcher mentions that this can help reduce the US imprint, which still predominates in the region, to develop research considering the particularities of Latin American inequality, which can be completely different from those that occur in other countries.

“There are many more things to investigate, from garbage dumps, pollution, stray animals -which are also an environmental problem- and others that are not necessarily linked to green areas and that people do not see. You have to make a network and invite people from countries without research and that more people join this, whether they are students, teachers or people from other sectors, because it is a super relevant topic and one that we need to talk about from all areas” , finished Fernandez.