Municipal Risk Atlases in Mexico as policy instruments for territorial regulation

Abstract

Municipal Risk Atlases are one of the policy instruments that Mexican government has prioritized in the last few years in order to consolidate the territorial regulation of human settlements in the country. This paper reviews the legal, institutional conceptual and methodological developments of these documents and analyzes its current scope and limitations within the Program of Risk Prevention in Human Settlements (PRAH), which had been designed and implemented by the Ministry of Social Development (SEDESOL) between 2010 and 2012, and by the Ministry of Urban, Territorial and Agrarian Development (SEDATU) from 2013. The objective of the paper is to understand the conditions under which the Municipal Risk Atlases have been produced to regulate human settlements in risk-prone areas, as one of many juridical instruments that operate in the fields of land use planning and natural hazards provisions. In the first place, we review different approaches that have been used by different agents within the federal government to produce cartographic information to identify and reduce disaster risk. That includes the different concepts and methodologies used to identify different risk components (such as ‘vulnerability’, ‘affected systems’, ‘disturbances’) but also under which institutional context each of them emerge, how they relate to each other and how are they integrated with other policy devices.