Headnote
ABSTRACT
Introduction: Climate change has been aggravating the condition of cities through extreme weather events, such as heat waves and intense rainfall.
Objective: This study aims to analyze certain techniques for reversing current urban systems, resulting from Brazilian urbanization, particularly the socio-environmental injustices it has produced, in order to mitigate the effects of climate change, by examining the instruments available and how they operate within this process.
Method: A bibliographic review of related themes, seeking to build a conceptual framework for a new approach to the urbanization process, more aligned with environmental issues.
Results and Discussion: By addressing urban ecology as a means of assessing the urban environment, in connection with landscape and natural environment concerns, and comparing it to the urban setting, the study highlights the need for a change in the urbanization process in light of climate change and the human-nature relationship, culminating in the importance of urban drainage and vegetation as key agents of mitigation.
Research Implications: Based on these concepts, the study outlines potential actions for the adoption of effective public policies aimed at combating and mitigating climate change, in contrast to the current neglect of the issue by governments-particularly at the municipal level-while seeking to demonstrate the importance of changing the way cities are urbanized and constructed.
Originality/Value: The article reflects on the current condition of cities and discusses how they can address the challenges posed by climate change, emphasizing both adaptation and mitigation of its effects.
Keywords: Urban and Territorial Planning, Sustainable Cities, Low Impact Development, Climate Change, Urban Renewal.
RESUMO
Introdução: As mudanças climáticas vêm agravando a situação das cidades com seus eventos climáticos extremos de ondas de calor e chuvas intensas.
Objetivo: O presente estudo tem como objetivo analisar algumas técnicas para reversão dos sistemas urbanos atuais, decorrentes da urbanização brasileira, especialmente a injustiça socioambiental por ela produzida, para a mitigação dos efeitos das mudanças climáticas, relacionando seus instrumentos e como atuam nesse processo.
Método: pesquisa bibliográfica dos temas relacionados, procurando construir um referencial de conceitos aplicados a uma nova abordagem do processo de urbanização, mais ajustada às questões ambientais.
Resultados e Discussão: abordando a ecologia urbana como uma forma de avaliação do ambiente urbano, conectado às questões da paisagem e do ambiente natural, comparado ao ambiente urbano, verifica-se a necessidade de uma mudança no processo de urbanização, face às mudanças climáticas e à relação do ser humano com a natureza, culminando na questão da importância da drenagem e vegetação urbanas como agentes dessa mitigação.
Implicações da Pesquisa: Através desses conceitos constrói-se a ideia das ações a serem tomadas para a adoção de políticas públicas efetivas para o combate e a mitigação das mudanças climáticas, contrapondo ao atual descaso dos governos, sobretudo os municipais, com o tema, esperando demonstrar a importância de uma mudança na forma de urbanização e construção das cidades.
Originalidade/Valor: O artigo traz à reflexão, a questão das cidades hoje e como podem enfrentar os desafios das mudanças climáticas, buscando adaptação e mitigação de seus efeitos.
Palavras-chave: Planejamento Urbano e Territorial, Cidades Sustentáveis, Desenvolvimento de Baixo Impacto, Mudanças Climáticas, Requalificação Urbana.
RESUMEN
Introducción: El cambio climático viene agravando la situación de las ciudades a través de fenómenos meteorológicos extremos, como las olas de calor y las lluvias intensas.
Objetivo: El presente estudio tiene como objetivo analizar algunas técnicas para la reversión de los sistemas urbanos actuales, derivados de la urbanización brasileña, en particular la injusticia socioambiental que esta ha generado, con el fin de mitigar los efectos del cambio climático, relacionando sus instrumentos y la manera en que actúan en dicho proceso.
Método: Investigación bibliográfica sobre los temas relacionados, orientada a construir un marco conceptual aplicado a un nuevo enfoque del proceso de urbanización, más ajustado a las cuestiones ambientales.
Resultados y Discusión: Al abordar la ecología urbana como una forma de evaluar el entorno urbano, en conexión con las cuestiones del paisaje y del medio natural, en comparación con el medio urbano, se constata la necesidad de un cambio en el proceso de urbanización frente al cambio climático y a la relación del ser humano con la naturaleza, culminando en la importancia del drenaje y la vegetación urbanos como agentes de dicha mitigación.
Implicaciones de la Investigación: A partir de estos conceptos se construye la idea de las acciones necesarias para la adopción de políticas públicas eficaces frente a la lucha y la mitigación del cambio climático, en contraste con la actual desatención de los gobiernos, especialmente los municipales, hacia esta cuestión, con la intención de demostrar la importancia de un cambio en la forma de urbanizar y construir las ciudades.
Originalidad/Valor: El artículo invita a reflexionar sobre la situación actual de las ciudades y cómo estas pueden afrontar los desafíos del cambio climático, orientándose hacia la adaptación y la mitigación de sus efectos.
Palabras clave: Planificación Urbana y Territorial, Ciudades Sostenibles, Desarrollo de Bajo Impacto, Cambio Climático, Recalificación Urbana.
1 INTRODUCTION
Abstract: In the fight against climate change, different studies on techniques arise proposing the reversal of urban systems, in an attempt to mitigate their effects, regularly associated with environmental disasters. The present study analyses some of them and seeks to relate their main instruments and how they act in this process. Initially, some representative concepts of climate change and its effects on the urban environment are listed, to have them based on the analysis of the concepts, aiming at a public policy for mitigating climate change in the urban environment.
It is known that with the advent of increasingly severe climate change, it is necessary to reverse the urban conditions that contribute to this phenomenon. Since the publication of the report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007, the debate has reignited, therefore, the consequences of global warming, although still uncertain, are alarming (Ribeiro, 2008). And considering that almost half of the world's GHG emissions are produced within urban areas (Ge; Friedrich, Vigna, 2020), in a world becoming increasingly urban, this environment will tend to continue to increase its emissions by its expansion, if the current model is maintained. In this context, the role of peripheral countries, of late, intense and accelerated urbanisation, such as Brazil (Santos, 1993), has a great impact.
Throughout this dynamic of frenetic urbanisation, socio-environmental injustices have emerged and arise, since the process occurs in a speculative way, meeting the "private and accumulation demands" (Ribeiro, 2008, p.309). Added to this, the industrialisation process in Brazil contributed to the construction of this urban environment that left the working class on the sidelines of this growth, as it was based on low wages, leaving them the peripheries, built illegally on risk areas (Maricato, 2013).
From the 1970s, neoliberalism brought a political and economic restructuring, which also reflected in the restructuring of urban policy (Nobre, 2013). The new condition of deregulation, passed the decisions to the market, under the pretext of being more rational (Acselrad; Mello, Bezerra, 2009), leaving the deeper discussion even further away from the population, especially those poorer and peripheral, intensifying this condition of socioenvironmental injustice, disguised as "a natural evolution of the world, as they want to believe, but a persistent and victorious ideological and programmatic construction" (Maricato, 2008).
The big question, as Joan Alier (2008) points out, is that the market is not concerned with adapting to ecology and is not concerned with future needs. In this way, the neoliberal illusion does not contribute at all to the reversal of social injustice, keeping the low-income population excluded from the legal city and living in precarious conditions in the peripheries, usually in risk areas, which have no commercial value for their environmental restrictions and are abandoned, providing themselves to irregular occupations and vulnerable to the effects of climate change, where, unfortunately, the excluded try to survive in their precarious dwellings.
2 CLIMATE CHANGE
Climate change means significant and lasting changes in global or regional climate patterns, resulting from natural factors and, more recently, human activity. This concept encompasses a wide range of phenomena, including global warming, which is the increase in Earth's average temperatures due to the greenhouse effect accentuated by greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC, 2021). One of the effects caused by global warming is the melting of the ice caps, which causes rising sea levels, with devastating consequences for coastal cities and island countries.
This phenomenon of climate change, when resulting from human activity, is due to the linear system of production established in consumerist capitalist society, in which production processes increase according to demand, without concern for the recharge capacity of the natural environment, creating a linear metabolism with input of natural resources on a large scale for the production of this urban artificial metabolism, releasing, at the other end, also in large quantities, residues, which return directly to the natural environment (Oliveira; Santos, 2021; Rogers; Gumuchdjian, 2008). This development at any cost in the industrial era advanced on the landscape causing radical changes in nature (Silva, 2015). Social inequalities, in short, are linked to the capacity for capital accumulation. And when it comes to climate change, the force of natural disasters, make them more evident, exposing the reality of the social vulnerability of Brazilian cities. Beck (2009) states that "boundaries (whether real or discursive)" are conventions that exist in people's heads and in laws. However, Beck continues, the 'export' of climate threats beyond the borders of the dominant, whether in a country or a city, does not mean acceptance by the population that receives them, but rather an inability to express their denial.
Urban areas now account for nearly half of GHG emissions. Since its transport is based on the fossil fuel model and the predominance of individual car use, the emission of CO2, which causes urban air pollution, has a protagonist role (Ribeiro, 2008). And this pollution, associated with the rapid and disorderly urban growth, which is causing an increase in the impermeable areas in the cities (which are large generators of heat) and the scarcity of urban forestry, results in environmental inequalities. All this neglect of the pre-existing natural environment, therefore, generates a precipitation of cold air masses at localised points, resulting in heavy rains (concentrated and high volume), which when falling on urban areas, generate laminar runoff, due to the aforementioned significant increase of waterproofing in the natural soil, especially by paving the road system (Tucci, apud Morelli; Barbassa, 2009). This fast and high volume laminar flow, associated with drainage systems through conduits and channels, causes the flow to exceed the maximum limits of the receiving bodies, whose intensity results in local disorders, such as flooding of public roads and buildings. These consequences are also increased by the absence or reduction of green areas during the urbanisation process, contributing to the reduction of the capacity of absorption and natural drainage of the soil. In this context, one can not forget the influence of urban design on drainage, since it not only defines the layout of the road system, along which the flow of rainwater walks, as it is who can define the green and permeable areas. All this conventional drainage system implemented in the cities, culminating in flooding within the urban network.
Another disastrous consequence of the heavy rains in the urban areas is the slipping of slopes, exposed by the suppression of vegetation, or by irregular occupations, whose earth and mud, at the moment of the collapse, drags with it everything that lies ahead. This factor, added to the flooding within the urban area, whose largest volume of water walks by gravity downstream, ending up mainly on the urban fringes, precisely where the poorest and excluded populations live in subhousing, making the damage even more significant, as it overcomes the material damage, claiming lives.
Still within the urban area, there are also the so-called heat islands. In a study conducted by geographer Magda Lombardo in 1985, the causes of this phenomenon were pointed out within the cities. They are the result of changes in the surface of the earth and its atmosphere, promoted by urbanisation (Oke, 1972, apud Lombardo, 1985, p. 23). Abstract: In urban centres, with the high concentration of heat sources by human activity and also by the buildings themselves and their construction materials, there is the apex of the occurrence of this phenomenon (Lombardo, 1985). Also contributing to this condition are the scarcity of vegetation and the impermeability of the soil, as well as atmospheric pollution and the very urban morphology that concentrates the buildings and raises them with many floors, creating barriers to the circulation of air. As a consequence, Lombardo (1985) states, in addition to the increase in local temperature, there is a reduction in the relative humidity of the air, which causes an artificial desertification, compromising the health of local residents.
3 URBAN ECOLOGY
According to Oliveira and Santos (2021), the term Urban Ecology emerged in 1920. However, until the end of the 20th century it was little studied, becoming more prominent only in the 21st century, especially due to the advancement of the urban population, making cities the main human habitat (Oliveira; Santos, 2021) and the climate prospects increasingly aggravated.
Abstract: Urban ecology is an area of ecology that studies the processes and relationships between human beings (social), nature (environmental) and infrastructure (city), aiming at a more sustainable city. According to Osmond and Pelleri (apud Oliveira; Santos, 2021, p.118), it analyses the "modification of natural ecosystems by anthropic actions", within the natural difficulties of a mutant environment and often in imbalance. It provides an approach to understanding the functioning of the natural environment within the city, to promote its preservation since its knowledge is directed "to the resolution of problems that affect the dynamics of cities and their ecosystems", as Oliveira and Santos (2021, p.119) teaches us.
To urban ecology, landscape ecology is added with its offer of study on the issues of scales, important in the relationship between the environment and the human being, particularly in the scale of metropolitan landscapes, since global preservation, increasingly depends on urban sustainability (Wu, 2008).
According to a recent UN report (2024), the world population is expected to grow to 10.3 billion in 60 years, starting then a gradual reduction by the end of the 21st century when it will reach about 10.2 billion people. However, urbanisation will grow at an independent pace and should not retreat, due to continuous migration on the planet, keeping its consumption of resources active on several ecosystems, at various and different distances from the centres of human consumption (Wu, 2008).
Thus, the challenge will not be to contain urbanisation, but rather to change the way it is done, transforming the process of uncontrolled urbanisation into a process of sustainable transformation of cities, since it is the cause, but also, as stated by Wu (2008, p.46-47) "inevitable path to regional and global sustainability", necessarily requiring the active participation of the human being.
In this study, we define sustainability by the classic concept presented in the Brundtland Report (UN, 1987), as the ability to meet current needs without compromising those of future generations. In this way, sustainability will influence the relations between the human being and the natural environment, so that the human being uses natural resources to meet their needs, but with parsimony, proportional to the environment aiming at its regeneration and maintenance of its natural wealth perpetually, also benefiting future generations.
In the context of cities, urban planning is governed by different conflicting interests and unequal forces. This mixture of interests makes the activity complex, often diverting it from correct technical solutions and social pacts that converge interests. In this environment, it is known the predominance in governments, as Torres (2007) teaches us, of the practice of keeping the most important issues out of public discussions, under the pretext of obtaining a more rational solution, with the excuse that ordinary people only see their immediate problems and, thus, little or nothing would contribute to the planning process (Torres, 2007). Even so, within these conditions, the search for means of mitigating the effects of climate change on cities is increasingly intense among technicians and scientists. In this field, the insertion of urban ecology in the planning process can benefit the population, in the mitigation of environmental impacts through an integrated vision of the natural and the built ecosystem, in the search for urban sustainability (Oliveira; Santos, 2021), a concept broader than that of environmental protection and brings with it the notions of "equity between peoples and between generations as a fundamental factor to achieve its objectives." (Carmani, 1999, apud Higueras, 2006, P.16). In addition, the way the city uses its soil, in addition to protecting biodiversity and its vegetated areas, should also protect its identity and historical pattern (CCE, 2004).
Although cities are different in their culture and geography, they always affect the natural environment on which they were built, the one immediately adjacent to their territory and even beyond. It is at this point that urban ecology contributes with its study to understand the relationship between the spatial-temporal patterns of urbanisation and ecological processes (Wu, 2008, p.42).
Urbanisation can influence local climate and water resources due to plant suppression and soil sealing. According to Wu (2008) the bioecological approach examines the dynamics of urban areas as artificially altered ecosystems. Also according to him, bioecology needs to expand its interdisciplinarity with the social sciences, so that research is more inclusive (Wu, 2008).
4 DRAINAGE AND VEGETATED AREAS IN THE URBAN AREA
Urban drainage systems have emerged as a sanitary concept, moving water away from cities quickly, to preserve public health from the ills that puddled water could cause. However, this condition of removal by drainage networks, creates downstream impacts as it concentrates the volume of water discharged and with speed, transferring the problem to other locations (Poleto, 2011). With climate change, the effect of this historical concept of tubular drainage has brought catastrophic consequences to the urban environment, by taking all this water downstream, without worrying about what will come across at the destination, invariably a body of water, regardless of its capacity to absorb the extra volume released into it.
The rain, when falling on the impermeable soil, whether from the road system or inside private properties, forms a continuous water slide, running in the direction of falling from the surface, as it does along the gutter of a street. The more intense the rain, the greater the volume of water and the faster the runoff will make it reach the main channel of a body of water, causing larger flows than the natural ones, overflowing it. However, this practice of conducting tubulated rainwater over time has shown that, in addition to increasing the flow, it is able to hide serious problems, ranging from clogging wolf mouths, point of entry of water into the rainwater network, through obstructions in galleries, by sediment deposits or accumulation of garbage thrown on the streets, to its mouth in a body of water, where a speed reduction device of low efficiency is usually made. It happens that the receiving water body, has a limited capacity for receiving water and at the same time that the rainwater is poured into it, it is already running overwhelmed by the natural increase of its flow, which causes its transhipment. In this way, occasional flooding can also occur where a collecting mouth is clogged, and right at the beginning of the route they can also overflow where the gallery is obstructed, by sedimentation of particles of soil or garbage thrown onto the streets by the population.
When talking about galleries obstructed by garbage, comes the issue of environmental education, so that citizens understand the severity of this act (and here not only because of drainage, but for all the damage to the environment and human health that the accumulation of garbage causes) and even more serious, a common issue in low-income neighbourhoods, where through ignorance (or bad faith), people connect their domestic sewage network to the rainwater network, dumping this sewage laden with debris that will contaminate the drainage network and the receiving water body. And this action is practically undetectable in the underground piped networks.
A serious deficiency of the current municipal legislation of cities, in general, is the lack of regulation of urban drainage, both in relation to the public part (which is the responsibility of the municipality itself), and to the private sphere. More than that, it is necessary to do it with an ecological vision, making use of instruments that change the way of designing urban drainage systems, making them sustainable. It is imperative that the laws of zoning, land use and occupation are intertwined with the rules of low-impact development and sustainable urban drainage (which we will see below), either within the same law, or in a specific law (provided that they are tied together, mainly so that future revisions are joint). In addition, increasing control by requiring the implementation of rainwater retention and infiltration equipment and the maintenance of some degree of soil permeability within private properties, as part of an interconnected urban system, needs to be a rule, since, as seen, soil sealing is the major cause of urban flooding. The great difficulty of this part is the post-occupation control, since during use, the owner may mischaracterise these conditions, which would require permanent inspection.
With the increase of studies on natural drainage systems, in the late 1990s, the function of soil permeability and vegetated areas also began to be recognised by the importance of its role within the urban system (Souza; Cruz, Tucci, 2012) and in this context, the function of urban vegetation appears in addition to urban cooling, as a regulator of the rainfall regime and maintenance of air humidity, through the evapotranspiration of its foliage (Morelli and Barbassa, 2009). This new angle of vision of urban vegetation, also called green areas, reinforces the importance of its preservation in the urban environment.
In addition to their importance in the urban environment, green areas are part of the green infrastructure, which Benedict; McMahon (Apud Hannes, 2015, p.57) describe as a natural support system, which also contains water bodies, conservation areas and the undisturbed natural environment. That is, they are part of the natural environment of the planet and contribute to human life. Unfortunately, contrary to this relevance, these natural areas are being suppressed more and more quickly.
5 SUSTAINABLE URBAN DRAINAGE
Currently, there are some different terminologies for similar concepts of sustainable drainage. They have been presented as: Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS), in the United Kingdom; Low Impact Development (LID), in the USA and Canada and: Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD), in Australia, among others (Poleto, 2011; Lourenço, 2014). These systems are the most advanced and should compose a new study for a policy of urban rainwater management in Brazil (Souza; Cruz, Tucci, 2012). In these studies, the concepts of Low Impact Development (LID) and Sustainable Urban Drainage System (SUDS) will be addressed as a reference for new urbanisation practices.
The concept of Low Impact Development (LID), adopts a "different posture from the conventional in rainwater management" (Prince George's County, 1999, p.9), creating an active management of rainwater, mitigating the impacts of runoff and pollution sources, maintaining the local hydrological balance. Thus, LID techniques should be considered already in the urban design to be implemented, predicting the densification of the urbanised area, aiming to preserve the maximum of pre-existing non-compacted vegetated areas, as shown in Figure 1, with the conservation of natural soil and the recovery of its vegetation cover. Hydrology should be part of the project, since the strategies of the system provide control of the decentralised hydrological source for stormwater runoff. In short, it seeks to control rainwater, starting at the point where it falls, through active management, redoing local hydrology, mimicking its preoccupation behaviour through a series of techniques that are referred to as LID Integrated Management Practices (LID-IMPs), or LID Integrated Practices. LIP-IMPs are "design techniques that infiltrate, store and evaporate the flow near its source" (USDoD, 2010, p.1), distributed in small natural controls.
The system can be used within already urbanised areas, which have vegetated permeable areas, or spaces for its creation and locations for implanting flow control points. These factors will ensure the improvement of the environmental conditions of that urbanised area, in addition to reducing the use of rainwater galleries, which contribute to flooding due to their characteristic of acceleration of flow velocity (Agostinho; Poleto, 2012).
The Sustainable Urban Drainage (SUDS) concept deconstructs the principle of rapid runoff and forms a set of implanted equipment within an urban area (including private properties) with the function of retaining and infiltrating rainwater, which runs superficially, laminar and at high speed, due to the impermeable urban environments. This equipment and facilities when used together, within a drainage project that respects and considers the pre-existing hydrology at the site, will make the urban environment, after being consolidated, still maintain retention, infiltration and drainage characteristics minimally equal to that of the preexisting natural environment, and also the possibility of expanding its retention capacity, contributing to the mitigation of drainage liabilities, perhaps existing upstream of the area where they are applied, since they seek to approach the "behaviour of rainwater to the natural conditions prior to human occupation." (Poleto, 2011, p.8).
The SUDS concept brings an integrated drainage vision to retain water in the place, mitigating to the maximum its flow and speed (Lourenço, 2014), through retention and infiltration through infiltration ditches, rain gardens, retention reservoirs, grassy bands, among other devices that work together, retaining rainwater at the maximum peak of rainfall and infiltrating into the soil part of this retention, thus feeding the urban ecosystems formed by the vegetated green areas, used for water absorption, contributing to the reproduction of the natural system, maintaining the water balance and mitigating the concentration of rainfall.
Recently, the concept of sponge cities has emerged, based on a Chinese programme of the same name, whose goal is for the city to retain, within it, between 70% and 90% of the rainwater through LID systems, absorbing it and storing it like a sponge, in order to filter this water and reuse it. (Jones, 2024). It is another way of adjusting the urban fabric to climate change, in the search for more balanced and sustainable cities.
6 BIOCLIMATIC URBANISM - ECOLOGICAL URBANISM
"Bioclimatic urbanism aims to reduce as much as possible the negative impacts that urbanisation has on the environment" (Higueras, 2006, p.15). The urban layout must be adapted to the conditions of the territory, relief and climate. In short, as stated by Higueras (2006), there should be a planning for each place. Thus, this urban layout must respect the topographic conditions and the winds, besides privileging the insolation. Green areas should be adequate to the demands of humidity and environmental evaporation and have appropriate plant species, preferably native ones. Buildings should be well orientated towards sunlight and have green and permeable areas proportional to the local climate.
The first theories and essays on the subject arise in bioclimatic architecture, which produces results in relation to the insolation and thermal comfort of buildings, bringing together a reduction in water and energy consumption, also generating well-being to the population. This concept, when expanded to deployments of urban areas, such as neighbourhoods, transmutes into bioclimatic urbanism. This is one of the reasons why it extends to buildings, transcending the boundaries of the external urban environment.
Considering the global climate, bioclimatic urbanism divides the planet into four climatic regions: cold, temperate, hot, arid and hot and humid. For each region it establishes guidelines for urban planning from urban structure, public spaces, landscape, vegetation, orientation, to reach guidelines for buildings. This condition seeks to adapt the concept to the natural climatic differences of the planet, avoiding that a certain functional orientation in a tropical region is mistakenly used in a cold climate, where the incidence of sunlight itself is different. At this point, it is essential to take into account the need for environmental impact studies, prior to bioclimatic actions, as these will be based on the reduction of these impacts.
As can be seen, bioclimatic urbanism is a technique aimed mainly at new deployments of urban development, as can be seen in Figure 2, since it influences the urban layout, which in a consolidated urban area is already pre-existing. This means that its principles can be adopted in public policies for the expansion of the urban fabric, if they are consolidated in urban legislation as guidelines and requirements for new projects. It is also applicable in some cases of more intense urban transformation, with an urban redesign, which in the same way may require, through legislation, the use of this technique.
In a similar line of thought, there is Ecological Urbanism, which looks at cities and their existing territories, with a look at ecology, aiming at environmental protection and socioenvironmental justice. It focuses on a model of developing autarky for the supply of water and energy, where the model of the search for increasingly distant resources is no longer viable (Hodson; Marvin, 2014). According to Fainstein (2014) urbanism should stimulate human development and at the same time environmental improvement and preservation. It also teaches that it is necessary to generate environmental equity, through the reallocation of government spending on popular housing and the provision of public services, not using the public budget to favour the real estate market and other private interests. At this point, reinforces Frug (2014), the fragmentation of public power at federal, state and municipal levels, as well as municipalities and departments, generates uncoordinated actions that disadvantage environmental equity.
Finally, the growing convergence between urbanism and landscaping reinforces the image of the landscape as "a new agent of public order" (Lister, 2014, P. 537) and in its broader aspect, "involving geology, topography, soil structures, phenomenology and plant and animal ecologies." (Schwartz, 2014, P.524), since the public landscape of the city is a critical component, where social and environmental systems occur.
7 DISCUSSION
The climate issue has been getting worse and, it seems, the world governments, although they keep the issue on their agendas, do little or nothing in practice. When reflecting on a global issue like this, involving the entire planet, although it affects everyone daily, sometimes has its local reflection decreased, in the face of the difficulties of everyday life of each, appearing disinterest of society. At this point, it is worth discussing that, even though it is a global issue, the actions need to be local and even punctual, also involving society, since it is in each city where one lives that it appears and with different effects.
The concepts raised in this study have in common the search for mitigation of the effect of climate change within urban areas. It has different points and others in common, and eventually can be used together, enhancing their actions and achievements. They demonstrate the real feasibility of implementing real and effective mitigation actions.
National governments direct public policies at the macro scale, while municipal governments must bring them to the local scale. In addition to the creation of social and housing public policies, it is urgent to adopt urban and environmental public policies to mitigate the effects of climate change, in order to protect and raise awareness of the most environmentally vulnerable population and reverse the perverse process of current urbanisation, which does not respect the natural environment and marginalises the poorest, who live on the fringes of the legal city. The transversality of the theme demonstrates its impact on various sectors of society, such as public health, where the increasingly harmful effects of climate change can boost pandemics, as we have recently experienced in the case of Covid-19.
In addition to a legal structure with a master plan and land use and occupation law, municipalities need to adopt in their legislation the concept of a sustainable urban drainage plan, associated with the creation and conservation of large vegetated and permeable areas, to small neighbourhood squares and urban afforestation. In this context of afforestation of public roads, which actively work for urban cooling and at the same time, when inserted in rain gardens, which are micro receptors for retention and infiltration of rainwater, assisting in urban drainage. Associated with this fact, the adoption of a landscaping based on natural species of the biome in which the city is inserted, reinforcing its biodiversity, provided that they are duly compatible with the air wiring networks of the cities, to avoid their mutilation, under the excuse of security pruning, when a policy of location on opposite public sidewalks does not fit together, or even of replacement of the air network by buried network. Within the context of this plan, cities should also adopt urban development policies, aligned with urban ecology, which brings to this context the study of the natural landscape, inducing the understanding of the biome in which the city is inserted, preserving it to the maximum and seeking strategies to reverse the environmental damage caused by urbanisation.
Finally, within the legislation of land parcelling, seek to aggregate in urban requirements that minimise the impact of urbanisation, adopting concepts of bioclimatic urbanism and LID, so that new developments, both for expansion of the urban territory and within the current urban fabric, are limited, first of all, to the carrying capacity of the local site and produce cities adapted to the natural territory and not the other way around, with the adaptation of the territory to the city project.
Only with actions like this, municipalities will move from stagnation to preventive proactivity in mitigation and when possible even in the reversal of these problems.
The great territorial extension of Brazil is always a limiting factor in federal actions. As the Forest Code (Federal Law 12.651 / 2012), has restrictions and defects when trying to deal with the whole Brazilian forest issue, flattening the differences of the various biomes here, in an attempt to create a single rule for such a diverse natural environment, the issue of adaptation of cities to climate change, from the federal point of view, can only dictate a generalised public policy, with the role of municipalities to adjust it to their locality. However, it is a fact that public administrations ignore this issue, either by ignorance or contempt and their leaders do not have the appropriate preparation (and even the advisory) to address it, perhaps to face it. This must be countered by the increasing dissemination of information, while providing broad access to it.
Here it is possible to make a comparison with the entire municipal urban planning strategy created in the country, based on articles 182 and 183 of the Federal Constitution of 1988, which provide for urban policies and their subsequent developments, such as the Statute of the City (Federal Law 10.257 / 01), which brought with it the municipal councils of urban policy and the conferences of cities, municipal, state and federal, which fight to this day to implement the culture of urban planning in ordinary citizens. Awareness of the severity and need to confront climate change may need to go through a similar and initially imposing way of discussing the issue from the local to the national level, involving governments and the population, so that the issue enters the agenda of daily life in cities definitively. The Federal Government, through its leaders and technical bodies, together with the scientific community and the population, urgently needs to study and evaluate the most efficient and adaptable methods to the Brazilian reality, seeking to insert them, from the Federal Constitution, through a specific federal law, to reach the context, where the adoption of a permanent municipal system of adaptation and mitigation of climate change becomes, more than a legal obligation, a local collective awareness of the problem and becomes a matter of daily life in the city and its local administration, through legislation and a council to discuss it permanently.
Necessarily, the confrontation of climate change will expose the socio-environmental injustice existing in the country, born of its uncontrolled urbanisation and based on speculation of land ownership, as we saw at the beginning of this study. In this way, the motivations that involve its adoption or not, are of a political-economic nature, which requires political will and courage to face large accumulating groups of private capital and, more than that, to resume the question of balance with the social question.
The big question is: to what extent will political leaders have the courage to face accumulative capital, in favour of socio-environmental justice?
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