Table_1_An Analysis of Current Sustainability of Mexican Cities and Their Exposure to Climate Change.DOCX

The increasing demand for goods and services in cities around the world due to a rapidly growing urban population is pushing the socioecological systems that support them to their limits. The complexity of urban socioeconomic and environmental systems and their interactions generate a challenging multidimensional decision problem. In response, governments around the world are currently generating a variety of measurements that aim to portrait the main factors that are related to the level of sustainability that a city shows. While the objective of these efforts is to help in the process of urban policy making, these measures are often hard to interpret and do not lend to discover underlying characteristics that may be common among a group of cities. Moreover, these measures are typically focused on describing the current state and omit future challenges such as climate change, which may significantly affect any evaluation of urban sustainability. Recently, the Institute of Ecology and Climate Change (INECC) of Mexico produced a dataset of 36 sustainability related variables for over 100 cities that has the objective of helping federal and state level governments defining sustainable urban strategies. Here we use multivariate statistical techniques to (1) decrease the dimensionality of the dataset and find indices that could be more useful to decision makers; (2) find commonalities among cities include in the dataset in order to help in designing urban strategies for cities with similar characteristics; (3) cities are ranked in terms of their sustainability and characteristics and; (4) the sustainability ranking is compared to estimates of how much the current climate in each of these cities is expected to change during this century, which would add further challenges to maintain or improve urban sustainability.

全球城市人口快速增长，带动城市商品与服务需求持续攀升，使得支撑城市运转的社会生态系统濒临承载极限。城市社会经济与环境系统本身的复杂性及其交互作用，构成了极具挑战性的多维决策难题。对此，全球各国政府当前正生成各类评估指标，旨在刻画与城市可持续发展水平相关的核心影响因素。尽管此类工作的初衷是助力城市政策制定，但现有评估指标往往难以解读，且无法用于挖掘不同城市群体间共有的潜在共性特征。此外，这类指标通常仅聚焦于刻画城市当前状态，却忽略了气候变化等未来挑战——这类挑战可能会显著影响城市可持续性的各类评估结果。近期，墨西哥生态与气候变化研究所（Institute of Ecology and Climate Change, INECC）针对全球超100座城市构建了包含36项可持续发展相关变量的数据集，旨在协助联邦与州级政府制定可持续城市发展战略。本研究采用多元统计技术，完成以下四项工作：(1) 实现数据集降维，提炼出更便于决策者使用的综合指标；(2) 挖掘纳入数据集的城市间的共性特征，助力为具有相似属性的城市制定适配的城市发展战略；(3) 基于可持续性水平与属性对各城市进行排序；(4) 将城市可持续性排名与各城市本世纪当前气候预计变化幅度的评估结果进行对比，进而为维持或提升城市可持续性增添额外挑战。