Climate-Environmental Governance in the Mexico Valley Metropolitan Area: Assessing Local Institutional Capacities in the Face of Current and Future Urban Metabolic Dynamics

This paper focuses on the evaluation of local institutional capacities for advancing climate-environmental governance in the Mexico Valley Metropolitan Area (MVMA). It starts with a brief contextualization of the MVMA, followed by an estimation of current and tendential urban inflows and outflows by 2050 with the objective of delineating the challenges and potential implications ahead. Next, an assessment of local climate-environmental institutional capacities is offered. For that, the methodology and main outcomes of the so-called ICI-CLIMA index is presented for 2019. A qualitative discussion continues in order to assert the challenges and opportunities for advancing a coordinated urban agenda for sustainability and resilience. Such discussion has been enriched with documental and other type of information gathered through field research in all of the 76 municipalities that comprise the MVMA. The paper concludes that, in addition to the limited current climate-environmental local capacities, there is a mismatch between them and both the level of climate vulnerability officially identified and the environmental challenges currently facing. Therefore, for coping with a tendential scenario of increasing urban inflows and outflows and their associated climate-environmental implications, MVMA governments will have to improve their capacities while advancing, at all levels of government, the coordination of climate-environmental agendas, and of the later with urban planning and development agendas.