జర్నల్ ఆఫ్ ఎన్విరాన్‌మెంటల్ హజార్డ్స్

The rural region known as "Valles Cruceos" is crucial to the supply of food and other resources to the fast-growing neighboring city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra (Bolivia). The region, like many other rural areas in South and Central America, is experiencing progressive and severe environmental degradation as a result of the growing demand for its natural resources. In this circumstance, sound policies and governance for sustainable land management are ineffective and unsupported by data and research findings. With this study, we want to create a novel and useful integrated hazard analysis method that will help understand hazard patterns based on evidence and inform risk assessment processes across the urban-rural continuum.

First, the area's most significant environmental threats were identified through questionnaire campaigns run by municipal employees. Hazard maps were created by utilizing a variety of environmental hazards indicators and concentrating on the threats that were primarily perceived by the region's residents, such as deforestation, water pollution and changes in precipitation. After a pair-wise comparison, a GIS environment was used to create an integrated hazard map. The proposed method can be scaled up for integrated environmental hazards analysis in similar regions of Latin America and the maps serve as a first baseline for the analysis of the current state of natural resources in the "Valles Cruceos" area.