Environmental resilience in urban socio-ecological systems of neo-tropical cities, Quito and Guayaquil cases

The global urbanization process and the growth of the urban population are two dominant demographic trends in the 21st century. Both are a product of socio-ecological relations and are presented as true challenges of sustainability. Urban environments must guarantee environmental justice and welfare of citizens. Environmental monitoring methods that include from a spatial approach the use of sensors and television techniques, and integrate from a socio-ecological perspective the understanding of environmental variations are very little used in developing countries. The application of these methods, their results, analysis and decision making from them, could be decisive in urban planning. This project proposes to expand the knowledge regarding the urban environmental quality of the cities of Ecuador, considering a framework of complex adaptive systems that integrates different socio-ecological dimensions from a temporal space approach and establishes sustainability criteria that includes these dimensions generating a toolbox that can be applied in urban planning dynamics of neo-tropical cities. For this we propose the space-time analysis of some environmental indicators in Andean and coastal cities. In the spatial field, to understand the environmental and coverage variations of the Earth we turn to the use of remote sensors (spot, Sentinel). We also use databases of monitoring results of more than ten years of pollution and meteorological indicators. In the temporal field we analyze the before and after two random events, states of exception due to: global health emergency and carriers protests in Quito in October 2020. This information will be analyzed through statistical, geo-stadistic and artificial intelligence methods. Our results provide information on specific socio-ecological relations that caused environmental variations allowing to identify limits in the resilience capacity of urban environmental systems. This information is decisive for city planning decisions in the framework of environmental justice and well -being. Finally, this information will be integrated into a mobile application that will interact the citizen with the results of this project. Showing as a pilot to generate a scientific community of environmental monitoring focused on the delivery of information for both decision making and for the generation of early alerts, the environmental variations that compromise the system, in addition to the well -being and environmental justice of citizens.

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