Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Nature’s contributions to people are fundamental to life and directly affect the well-being of society as a whole. The objective of this study was to analyze the perceptions of these contributions from a gender perspective through Feminist Political Ecology. We present the valuation of the forest’s benefits to community members, women and men, and owners of an agrarian nucleus in the State of Mexico with exploited timber forest resources. This study is a qualitative exploration carried out through 35 semi-structured interviews, 13 with women and 22 with men, encompassing the meaning of the forest, the perception of the contributions of the forest, the anthropogenic drivers of change, and proposals to ensure the availability of these contributions. We found discrepancies in the perception of the contributions, explained by the differences in the traditional gender roles assignment and the sexual division of labor, which have permeated the distribution, access to benefits of the forest, and its management. We observed that the women community members develop a subtle perception of caring for the forest to preserve their harmonic relationships with nature. We suggest the latter as one of the differences that allow approaching and valuing social perceptions according to gender to redefine new action programs for the benefit of the forest and the well-being of people.

Recognizing the environment as a common and shared responsibility implies transforming it into a space for communication and democratic exercise, for which citizen commitment is required. Neighborhood Associations are organizations that represent a neighbors meeting space. The present work analyzes an experience carried out by the Neighborhood Association Quintas El Mirador, in the city of Puerto Madryn, Argentina, during the years 2016 to 2018. The purpose of the study was to propose a neighborhood approach through the construction of environmental citizenship as a way of experiencing Environmental Education (EE). The work methodology was mixed and organized in four phases: design, implementation, evaluation, and communication. As a result of the experience, it was possible to address 74 % of the problems mentioned in an initial survey, evidencing the potential of a neighborhood as a scenario for the construction of environmental citizenship in an EE context. The proposal’s originality was the socio-environmental approach at the neighborhood level, undertaken by twenty neighbors in the form of an environmental project. The results invite us to repeat the experience in other neighborhoods and contexts.

The islands of the Paraná Delta (Argentina) constitute an environmentalist territory in dispute. Scientific experts and specialized technicians highlight the importance of conserving these wetlands and warn about the negative consequences that the practices of local people have on environmental dynamics due to the loss of the provision of ecosystem goods and services. In various regulations and the sustainability framework, this discourse is used as a legitimizer to prescribe the best forms of use and appropriation of the territory. In this sense, in the present work, we analyze through the construction of a specific documentary corpus how the concept "ecosystem services" emerges as a device of environmental governmentality in the wetlands of the Paraná Delta. We were able to corroborate that all the documents initiated from the proposal linked to the danger of the non-sustainable use of the islands. In turn, the experts justify the need for its conservation based on the ecosystem goods and services they provide to society without considering the local population’s sociopolitical matrix or problematizing those who access said services.

Knowing the capabilities of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) to undertake actions to adapt to climate change is of great importance, as they are key actors in the execution of public policies in this matter. The objective of this research was to assess the capacities of various CSOs to undertake actions aimed at adaptation to climate change after they participated in two projects implemented in the Gulf of Mexico in the period 2011-2018. The primary data collection was through surveys of 23 CSOs participating in the projects and interviews with seven key informants. The results indicate that the CSOs strengthened their capacities to adapt to climate change, specifically, due to their involvement in the projects. The assessment indicated that they have medium to high capacities independent of the CSO’s antiquity. The CSOs with capacities in environmental issues have begun to incorporate actions to respond to the impacts of climate change to reduce the vulnerability of the population, ecosystems, and productive sectors, which has resulted in them acquiring new knowledge in adaptation, allowing them, in turn, to integrate this approach into the projects they carry out and manage.

Environmental services are benefits that humans obtain from ecosystems. Currently, there are various public policy instruments to conserve them. However, there are very few established, standardized, and proven techniques and tools that allow evaluating the results of these efforts. In Mexico City (CDMX), environmental programs grant economic compensation to landowners for the conservation and maintenance of environmental services. It is essential to establish mechanisms and tools that allow the evaluation of these programs through participatory monitoring. This study reports the experience of designing tools to monitor three environmental services (water infiltration, carbon storage, biodiversity). We designed the techniques using unspecialized material, easily accessible and highly reliable and tested with beneficiaries and officials of a CDMX environmental program. This exercise allowed knowing the challenges and providing recommendations to improve these evaluations, with the objective of their future implementation, to evaluate environmental programs and empower local actors with more information about their ecosystems and the benefits they generate.

The Nevado de Toluca is a protected natural area located in the State of Mexico, which has suffered severe soil degradation processes. The government has faced this problem by implementing various public conservation policies. This article aims to analyze the public soil conservation policies implemented in the Nevado de Toluca through the content of historical documents related to the subject and the spatial description of their programs. The results indicate that the most successful public soil conservation policy was the one implemented during the 1980-1990 decade, represented by the Programa de Acondicionamiento de Suelos de la Protectora de Bosques del Estado de México. The least successful was the one of 1950, represented by the Programa de Corrección de la Cuenca Alta del Río Lerma, of the Dirección de Conservación del Suelo y Agua. The public soil conservation policy has allowed the recovery of 17 % of the surface of the Nevado de Toluca; however, some aspects must be analyzed to improve its operation.

This article aims to identify and analyze the academic production from the social sciences concerning the dangers of natural origin. We delimit it for Mexico’s northern border from 1996 to 2019. The methodological strategy used was a content analysis of the reviewed works’ objectives, methods, and analytical categories. We identified a consistent increase in interest in natural hazards, predominantly quantitative approaches and from a macro level of analysis, using categories such as social vulnerability, risk, and adaptation, despite the lack of dialogue with sociological theory. In conclusion, we find a diversity of works with different theoretical-methodological approaches that problematize the social, political, and economic context of the effects of natural phenomena. We show the diversity and evolution of these studies and the usage of the categories of analysis.

Review of the book by Virginia García Acosta and Raymundo Padilla Lozoya (coordinators) (2021). Historia y memoria de los huracanes y otros episodios hidrometeorológicos extremos en México. Cinco siglos: del año 5 pedernal a Janet. Mexico: CIESAS/Universidad de Colima/Universidad Veracruzana.

The playful observation of birds positively impacts society and biodiversity conservation. Although it has recently become popular in Latin America, its understanding is precarious. Here, we describe and analyze birdwatching in Latin America through a digital interview that we distributed in 2020 among the community of birdwatchers from the region, gathering information on their profiles, practices, motivations, preferences, and perceptions about the activity. The participants in the interview (626 people) are from 19 countries, mostly young people (21-40 years old), have a high degree of education, and reside in urban areas; in general, they carry out this activity with recreational, awareness-raising, and environmental conservation purposes. Rural and urban areas are the preferred sites for bird watching. In addition to birds, the focus is on photography, landscapes, and other animals. Ignorance of the activity among the general population restricts the development of bird watching in the region. Our results are relevant to support the execution of projects related to the activity, birdwatching, and the development of public policies associated with bird conservation.

Sanitation is a human right recognized internationally and nationally. As such, one of the main challenges for States is to achieve progressive realization. However, Mexico faces various problems in addressing sanitation issues, such as technical, sociodemographic, budgetary, institutional, and regulatory issues, which make it challenging to comply with this right, implying that the approaches to address this problem can vary. This work focuses on analyzing the inclusion of the human right to sanitation (DHS, by its initials in Spanish) in public policies in Mexico, specifically in the legal and institutional framework, following international standards to guarantee the effective implementation of this right. We carried out a documentary review that included specialized literature on public policies on sanitation, as well as government reports and legal documents. Among the main results, we found that it is necessary to 1) socialize the definition of sanitation as an autonomous human right that deserves the same attention as other human rights; 2) equitably include all elements of DHS in Mexican legislation; and 3) evaluate the implementation of DHS, both nationally and locally.