By Alejandro Angulo
The systemic fragmentation the world is currently going through forces organizations to reconsider preconceived ideas valid until not long ago—above all, reconsideration of climate change, biodiversity, local economies, digitization, geopolitics, and others. The contemporary era is characterized by fragmentation of the management of the international systems, and the bifurcation of alternatives represented by the central actors of the system.
What began as an era of change from 1980 to 1990 leading to many positive aspects has become an international crisis involving health, social, environmental, political, and social interactions within the framework of globalization. Globalization has generated its counterpoint: fragmentation. We see stagnation of the most important economies. For the first time since the 1970s, the world is witnessing a precarious imbalance with growth and inflation moving in opposite directions. These conditions occur in a geopolitical environment of fragmentation; breaches in the financial system (including rising asset prices and rising debt levels); and a climate crisis that seems to be getting out of control which makes the situation more serious in emerging countries.
The world is at a critical turning point with climate change and energy transition the two most pressing and challenging issues. The first has caused a progressive imbalance of natural phenomena: droughts are increasingly prolonged and tropical or glacial storms are more severe. This has had a direct impact on the stability of markets. The energy transition process requires adequate planning to balance environmental needs and economic growth along with measuring the impact of operations and the optimization of resources. It has been said that to achieve net zero emissions or similar climate goals, the main barrier for organizations is investment and having the appropriate technological solutions for it.
For ecological economics, the system concept in a central place (Kapp 1994, Naredo 1987, Funtowicz and Ravetz 1994, Constanza 1993) is so because the concept of system has shown that the relations between economy and nature cannot be resolved within the closed framework of economic objects. The system concept serves as an argument to refute the closed approach to economic values of standard economics. Economic objects are related in their existence through flows of matter, energy, and information with a whole series of other objects, which are called natural and/or with natural functions. These all take place within the biosphere, or the watershed. The concept of system constitutes a central idea contrasting with systemic fragmentation. The logical use of the concept of system has left anchored to the economic question of the standard economy the economic question that derives from a supposed world constituted by separate, fragmented, and eternal objects. Thus, the classical idea of the separability of the world into different but interacting sections is not valid or relevant. Rather, we must consider the universe as an undivided and unfragmented whole. Despite all this, the current world walks on a vision of fragmentation in various fields such as education, biodiversity, urban development, finance, and geopolitics. Thus, the Cartesian paradigm took hold of the collective mind of the West in a few centuries—convincing it of the existence of a fragmented world. The fragmentation process is more pressing in urban areas because for at least the last three decades fragmentation has become a recurring word in urban discourses.
Beyond the different meanings that the term may have and the uses that can be made of it, it is evident that there are physical-spatial manifestations that have motivated the persistence of the debate about the fragmented nature of contemporary metropolises.
There is a recent case study (first and only study on the subject) on urban and environmental fragmentation of the municipality of Querétaro published in Research Notebooks No. 1 of the Institute of Ecology and Climate Change, 2022, by Mtro. Javier García. The author affirms that fragmentation is “a major territorial process that is built through three threads: social fragmentation, physical fragmentation, and symbolic fragmentation. And he adds that, «On the other hand, there is the fragmentation of natural ecosystems, understood as the spatial loss and division in the amount of habitat, with the consequent reduction in the size of continuous surfaces of an ecosystem… creating smaller fragments isolated and separated by a matrix of land cover transformed by man.”
The study concluded that the largest number of fragments are found in the use of Rainfed Agriculture land with 352 fragments followed by Urban and Matorral crassicaule with 115. The size of an urban fragment is 125.8 hectares and the land use with the least number of fragments is the tropical deciduous forest with 5—however, it is the type of land cover with the greatest isolation, but it is also observed that it is the largest size per fragment with 551.4 hectares, and bodies of water with 4 with a size per fragment of 6.49 hectares.
Systemic fragmentation is a global trend, a process in different dimensions—political, economic, social, and environmental. Although a theoretical concept, it provides a vision of reality as an environmental, economic-social, and political problem—a current challenge to overcome.
