Urban change involves any change within urban environment associated with growth or decline. Some benefit people whereas others don’t.

The reasons why some megacities emerge is due to better job opportunities, centralized market, better pay and higher individualized wealth.

As young people move and live in more urban cities, there is a rise in natural growth as they can give birth to children which causes natural increase as more babies are born which causes more urbanisation as more schools and job opportunities are needed for the more people living there.

Migration is also a common cause to urbanisation as the more people of younger age move, the more need for more jobs. Migration is mainly caused by the push pull factors of a city, for example Rio could have the pull factor of having more job opportunities but the push factor of having a high crime rate.

Urban trends are the amount of people migrating or leaving urbanised areas. For example, urban trends can decrease or increase, like the amount of people moving into urban areas.

The reason why LICS have such high urban trends is due to their countries mostly being urban. As most people want to find better job opportunities and higher pay they migrate to these areas for these benefits.

Push factor examples: unemployment, lower wages, crop failure, poor living conditions, poor health and education services, few facilities, natural disasters, civil war.

Pull factor examples: more jobs, higher wages, better living conditions, better education and health services, better facilities, less chance of natural disasters.

Urbanisation- the process of making an area more urban, the population change from people moving from rural to urban areas.

Rio De Janeiro has quite a lot of social challenges, some examples being healthcare, education, water supply and energy supply.

The reason why healthcare is a social problem is because only 55 percent of the city has access to it, and services to high risk patients such as the elderly and the pregnant is extremely poor. The solved this problem by by giving a health kit to every home, and the impact of this caused less infant mortality and the life expectancy of those living there increased.

The reason why education is a social problem is because kids are allowed to leave school at the age of 14, and many usually leave to search for jobs, most of them going into the drug business as they have nowhere else to go. As well as this, teachers a lowly paid and so education is extremely poor. They solved this problem by by encouraging locals to volunteer and help at school, giving grants to poor families to help meet cost and making a private university in a favela.

The reason why water supply is a social problem is because 12 percent of Rio’s population doesn’t have access to running water, and 37 percent of that water is lost through leaky pipes. This problem has been solved by building seven treatment plants between the years of 1998 and 2014, 95 percent of the population had mains to the water supply.

The reason why energy supply is a social problem is because there a frequent blackouts in Rio due to shortages of electricity. This problem has been solved by installing 60km power lines, a new nuclear generator and a hydroelectric complex to increase electricity supply.

There was also multiple environmental problems, some of them being traffic congestion, air pollution, water pollution and waste pollution.

The problem with air pollution is because of heavy traffic and congestion on roads which causes a build up of exhaust fumes and mist from the Atlantic mixes up with this and pollution from factories and other places which causes bad air quality. This has been solved by an expansion to the metro zone to the south zone as well as new toll roads and making coast roads one way.

Another problem would be waste pollution which mainly occurred in the favelas. As the favelas are located on steep hills and mountains they are hard to reach for recycling trucks and so they can’t reach the favelas. The villagers have to dump their rubbish somewhere so they instead dump it in nearby water sources such as rivers and lakes which pollutes the water. They solved this problem by making a power plant using biogas from rotting rubbish. It consumes 300 tonnes of rubbish and can fuel approximately 1000 homes with electricity.

Water pollution was mainly found in Guanabara bay which was highly polluted and a major threat to wildlife. This caused a major commercial fishing decline as 55 rivers were heavily polluted, 200 tonnes of raw sewage found in them as well as 50 tonnes of industrial waste. This was solved by making 12 new sewage works and fining ships which illegally discharged fuel.

Ways to reduce deforestation is by cutting down old trees and letting saplings grow as well as preservation laws to stop deforestation in the rainforest altogether.