PU-ECH (Peri-Urban Environmental CHange)

Scientific Advisory Committee
Chair: Ian Douglas (UK); Tanya Bowyer-Bower (UK), Barry Costa-Pierce (USA), Leonard Malenga (Zambia), Eduardo Spiaggi (Argentina), Henk De Zeeuw (Netherlands), Wang Rusong (China); ex officio: Peter Dogsé (UNESCO, France), Luca Demicheli (EU-JRC, Italy)


Peri-urban areas are the transition zone, or interaction zone, where urban and rural activities are juxtaposed, and landscape features are subject to rapid modifications, induced by human activities.

The work of the PU-ECH project focuses on the following themes and their policy and management implications:

  • Nature and rates of land cover/ land use change in peri-urban areas.
  • Peri-urban land cover/land use changes and their origins in processes of migration, poverty and the provision of basic human needs.
  • Consequences of land cover/ land use changes as induced by materials flows for shelter, manufacturing, infrastructure, transportation: accumulation of the urban "stock".
  • Air and water pollution, soil and land contamination in peri-urban areas and their health and ecosystem impacts.
  • Impacts of water use, hydrological and aquatic ecosystem transformation and their consequences.
  • Ecology and biodiversity of peri-urban areas: resilience and response especially in stressed environments (includes shoreline and estuarine ecosystems and environments).
  • Political and institutional factors in peri-urban environmental change and policy frameworks for implementing alternatives.

These critical areas of land cover change, leading to transformations in the hydrological, ecological, geomorphological and socio- economic systems, are often neglected by both rural and urban administrations. However, as cities develop, much of their growth is located in such areas. Peri-urban areas occupy changing spaces on the margins of towns and cities. Many of their activities move outwards as the city grows, other activities and land uses become incorporated into the urban fabric.

The diversity of residents, land uses and economic activities means that peri-urban areas are seen in different terms and are valued in different ways by diverse groups of people and organizations. These values vary between continents, nations and regions. Some of the typical values are:

  • For the poor: places where it is easier to build shelters and to occupy land for agriculture.
  • For industry: sources of materials essential for urban life: water, brick-clays, sand and gravel, limestone, fuel-wood and timber
  • For the middle class: a potential residential zone for houses in a rural setting, with golf courses and other recreational facilities.
  • For local government: the fringes of urban areas are often a site for locating landfills, waste dumps, peripheral freeways, airports or noisy and toxic industries.
  • For conservationists: the site of valuable protected areas, forested hills, preserved woodlands, important wetlands or mangroves, and major coastal ecosystems.
  • For education and human well-being: the place of the first contact urban people have with major areas of natural vegetation and biodiversity.


Progress

The PU-ECH project, with funding from an ICSU grant with UNESCO support, has convened regional meetings in Rosario (Argentina), Lusaka (Zambia), Chenzen (China), Abuja (Nigeria) and Beirut (Lebanon).

The Abuja, Nigeria meeting (December 2003) was a collaborative pre-Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting civil society session organised with the Commonwealth Human Ecology Council (CHEC) and the Commonwealth Associational of Surveying and Land Economy (CASLE). It was attended by several Commonwealth country ministers and representatives of NEPAD as well as many Commonwealth professionals and civil society representatives. The collaboration of the other organisations enabled the aims and activities of SCOPE, as well as the purpose of the PU-ECH project, to be communicated to a large African audience.

From the Abuja meeting, the key scientific issues to emerge were:

  • At what scales are specific technologies appropriate?
  • Issues related to peri-urban land degradation, land restoration, re-use of mined land and mine waste, and the establishment of aquaculture in abandoned mine ponds.
  • Effective, locally acceptable means of classifying waste, such as domestic waste, hazardous waste and special waste.
  • What are the drivers of change, and the trends of change in peri-urban agriculture? How are they linked to processes in urban and in rural areas/
  • Means of evaluating the purity of water and the risks associated with appropriate sanitation systems.
  • Appropriate technologies for the management of peri-urban settlements, their resources and their production systems.

The Beirut, Lebanon meeting (March 2004) was arranged to immediately follow the meeting of the UNESCO Arab MAB Council and owes much to the efforts of Dr Boshra Salem, the SCOPE Egypt Secretary-General at that time, and to UNESCO support. Many of the Arab MAB members attended the PU-ECH sessions, widening the number of countries represented. From the Beirut meeting the issues were:

  • Is there a business case for a more sustainable city?
  • Implementing integrated watershed and water resource management in peri-urban areas.
  • Indicators and appropriate tests for the use of recycled water in peri-urban irrigation, particularly with reference to domestic grey water and for testing the health risks for vegetables from such peri-urban agriculture that are consumed uncooked.
  • The replacement of organo-phosphate pesticides by more appropriate biocides in peri-urban agriculture
  • Before developing strategies and policies for peri-urban green areas, there is a need for behavioural studies of people’s attitudes to, and expectations of green areas/ spaces with natural vegetation.
  • What local environmental futures are unacceptable to people?
  • How can we explain the relative biodiversity values and multipurpose greenspace benefits of a given site?


Reporting

A presentation on the PU-ECH project was made to the Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference in September 2003, and a chapter entitled “Peri-urban ecosystems and societies: transitional zones and contrasting values” was published in “Peri-Urban Interface: Approaches to Sustainable Natural and Human Resource Use”, edited by Duncan McGregor, David Simon and Donald Thompson, Earthscan, London, 2006.

An invited paper on “The human ecology of social, economic and environmental integration of urban areas” reported some PU-ECH results to INTA 28 World Urban Development Congress in Kuala Lumpur in September 2004.

A paper on “Peri-urban ecosystems in Kuala Lumpur and Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia” was contributed to the UNU/IAS and University of Tokyo workshop on “The ecosystem approach to urban environmental management” held in New York in November 2004.

Results of PU-ECH will be presented at the International Forum on Global Environmental Change and Land Use Change in Peri-Urban Areas in Taipei, Taiwan 28 November-3 December 2008.

Forthcoming:
The project synthesis volume is in preparation;
Douglas, I. 2008 Environmental change in peri-urban areas and human and ecosystem health, Geography Compass, in press.


Last up-dated May 2008