Sustainable development in São Paulo's Green Belt Biosphere Reserve

Abstract

Introduction: The Green Belt Biosphere Reserve, with 2.33 million hectares and its internal urban area with 220 thousand hectares, is configured as a water security territory and expresses a direct relationship between urban development and areas that ensure well-being and ecosystem services for 12% of Brazil's population. With seventy-eight municipalities that fully or partially integrate the GBBR, the socioeconomic differences and the different contexts of urbanization and governance reflect on territorial management at the local level and impact the environmental and regional sustainable development agendas. Objective: Based on a survey of environmental policies and correlations between economic and socio-environmental indicators on a municipal scale for the entire study area, this article assesses the level of development of the main environmental public policies and identifies the relationship between these policies and socio-environmental indicators. Originality: Although the Green Belt Biosphere Reserve is an area recognized by the United Nations (UN), the management of its territory depends on municipal actions that comprise it. Little attention has been paid to environmental management, especially in terms of public environmental policies and a broad and ongoing understanding of the conservation of this area. Results: The analysis shows that the different municipalities in the GBBR have different levels of implementation regarding Environmental Agenda. When considering the Municipal Plans for Urban Afforestation, Adaptation to Climate Change, Atlantic Forest and Solid Waste, only Guarujá, Mogi das Cruzes, Santos and São Paulo have these four policies in preparation or completed, while for 33.3% (n=25) of the municipalities, none of these agendas was developed, and a positive correlation was identified between the HDI and the largest number of implemented policies. Contribution: Large and medium-sized cities in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil, present studies addressing ecological patterns and processes, however, they do not address specific questions on the environmental sector itself, which this paper aimed at providing. Conclusion: As the Green Belt accounts for 72% of the volume of drinking water in all of São Paulo, the disparities between the municipal indicators analyzed reinforce the need to adopt the GBBR as a platform for adequate governance to integrate policies at different scales for sustainable regional development. Systemic efforts are needed, especially at the municipal scale, in order to carry out adequate environmental management of the GBBR territory.