Blue and Green Infrastructure: History and Experiences in Mexico and the Arid and Semi-Arid Global South

Current urban development poses numerous challenges for the Global South, mainly for its arid and semi-arid regions. First, this chapter aims to present the emerging blue and green infrastructure (BGI) concept as the result of a historical process whose deep roots can be found in the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions, the ecological conservation theory, but also in the traditional knowledge of communities forming diverse socioecological systems in the Global South. Then, as a part of its conceptual framework, which relies heavily on the provision of ecosystem services, the similarities and differences between BGI and other concurrent concepts are presented. Second, we review the ecosystem services provided by BGI, as well as some examples of its implementation in the Global South, emphasizing its benefits in terms of water quantity and quality, and the contribution of BGI to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Finally, although the BGI approach entered only recently into the national policy discourse, we present some governmental, academic, and social endeavors with positive effects on sustainable water management in Mexico. Our view is that the perspective of water conservation implicit in BGI is of urgent implementation in the arid and semi-arid growing cities of the Global South.