Análisis sistemático de variables para la evaluación de sustentabilidad en cuencas de zonas áridas

Since the introduction of the concept of sustainable development in the Brundtland Report, numerous scientific articles have proposed models for assessing watershed sustainability, with special attention to arid zones, as they are intrinsically vulnerable to phenomena such as water scarcity and desertification. To this end, diverse environmental, social, and economic variables have been used to build models to evaluate the current state and identify problems with proposals aimed at sustainable development. At present, there are multiple perspectives on how sustainability should be incorporated into a watershed assessment model, most of which focus on a specific aspect of the process based on some variable type. However, there is little information on identifying such measures and sustainability approaches to assess arid zone watersheds, which limits the visibility of the current and future reality of the development of these territories. Thus, this study presents a systematic analysis consisting of a bibliometric and content review of scientific articles that evaluate watershed sustainability in arid zones. In order to examine the evolution of sustainability assessment models, keywords were analyzed, and variables were identified and classified by type (environmental, social, and economic), which allowed for grouping the approaches of these assessment models into weak and strong sustainability. This study aims to provide an overview for future research on constructing sustainability assessment models for arid zone watersheds.