Sustainability assessment and intervention scenarios in a transnational watershed socioenvironmental system

Abstract The assessment of the sustainability status of territories is a prerequisite for the development of public policy strategies to be implemented on them aimed at attaining established sustainability goals. A socioenvironmental systems perspective, in which economic, social and environmental aspects constituting these territories and their interactions between them are considered, allows for a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of these systems. Given the complexity of such systems, sets of indicators are required to simplify and quantify them. Here, we developed a model of the dynamics of the socioenvironmental system associated with the Usumacinta River basin (URB), a 77,000 km 2 area shared by Guatemala and Mexico. We fed this model with information from a system of 51 sustainability indicators and modeled the relationships between these indicators, as well as developed indices to visualize the sustainability status of these components. This allowed us to evaluate the impact of different scenarios of change in the indicators of public policy on the entire URB system. We determine that the URB displays a good state of its natural component and of the impact human activities have in the territory; however, components associated with the human activities themselves, their drivers, the social condition and the human assets displayed differences in their sustainability status between countries. Concerning the evaluation of scenarios of changes in the magnitude of the public policy indicators, we established that Ecosystem Services payment increases the overall sustainability of the territory. We conclude that both environmental protection and social investment should be considered if socioenvironmental sustainability is to be attained.