Accelerated urban growth and unplanned land occupation have increased the vulnerability of cities to hydrometeorological events, particularly in contexts such as the city of Piura, which is affected by flooding associated with the El Niño phenomenon. These events generate damage to urban infrastructure; however, rather than addressing the root causes from an ontological perspective, implemented actions tend to focus on the effects rather than the underlying causes. In this context, this article analyzes the evolution of water bodies—specifically the Santa Julia Wetland—from a socio-hydrological approach, examining the dynamic interaction between human and natural systems. To achieve this, a multitemporal analysis was conducted using Sentinel-2 MSI satellite imagery processed in QGIS, covering the period from 2017 to 2024. The NDVI, NDBI, and NDWI indices were applied to assess vegetation cover dynamics, urban expansion, and hydrological variability within the Santa Julia Wetland. The results reveal a trend of increasing urbanized areas, accompanied by a progressive reduction in vegetation cover and alterations in water bodies. From a socio-hydrological perspective, it is concluded that flooding issues in Piura are not solely driven by climatic factors but also by structural transformations of the territory, resulting from soil impermeabilization processes associated with urban growth. The anthropogenic occupation of strategic ecosystems such as the Santa Julia Wetland and other closed basins has progressively diminished, reducing their capacity for hydrological regulation. In this regard, the study highlights the need to integrate urban planning approaches based on ecological infrastructure, recognizing these water bodies as fundamental elements for mitigating such impacts, rather than treating them as vacant spaces available for occupation.
This article analyzes the relationship between environmental conflicts and the opportunities for democratization during the Spanish Transition, based on a historical study of the emergence and configuration of the environmental movement. In contrast to an interpretation that separates environmentalism from democratization, it is argued here that the socio-environmental conflicts generated by the development policies promoted by the Franco regime -industrialization, mass tourism, hydraulic infrastructures or forestry policy- were spaces of popular resistance and generated new forms of collective action that connected the defense of the environment with demands for social justice and political participation. From an approach situated at the crossroads between environmental history and political ecology, it is argued that these conflicts expressed a challenge to the “environmental coloniality” imposed by authoritarian developmentalism and that, in many territories, they favored the emergence of a grassroots, decentralized and territorialized environmentalism. During the Transition, these movements broadened their social bases and thematized new forms of ecological citizenship, linking environmentalist demands with the struggle for the democratization of institutions, especially at the local level. Through the analysis of territorial cases, we show how environmental movements not only resisted the environmental impacts of the development model, but also contributed to expanding the democratic public space and introducing the right to nature and environmental justice into the political culture of the new democratic system.
The first decades of the 21st century have shown that global societies are facing a period of permanent and progressive climate emergency, which triggers impacts in both environmental and socioeconomic spheres, with a more aggressive effect on groups whose exclusion has been historically constructed. In this sense, theoretical studies have transcended the boundaries that separated natural and human aspects, intersecting in debates on environmental racism. Understood as a set of ideas and practices by societies and governments that accept environmental and human degradation under the justification of pursuing development, along with the implicit naturalization of the inferiority of certain ethnic segments of the population, environmental racism as a conceptual and analytical category is particularly recent. In this regard, this research, of a bibliographic nature, conducted a search in the Capes Thesis and Dissertation Catalog, finding 129 works that include environmental racism as a keyword. From this survey, it was possible to identify that the majority of the research is recent and conducted from various fields of knowledge. Regarding the themes of the investigations, topics predominantly address the impacts of environmental racism in urban spaces and peripheries, environmental education, and issues concerning quilombola communities. Therefore, the recent emergence of studies on this topic from different fields of knowledge is evidenced, demonstrating that the analyses, while broader and intersected, also reveal different interfaces through which environmental racism manifests in the Brazilian context.
The 2019-2023 period in Chile was particularly unusual. A massive protest challenged the political and economic system inherited from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, paving the way to vote for a new Constitution that replaced the one approved prior to the return of democracy. The public debate around the content and spirit of the new Constitution also witnessed the emergence of climate change and glaciers as political agents. Drawing from official records, social media and other sources, this article traces the trajectory of the debates around glaciers and their role for local communities and the nation over the past four decades. Topics such as access to water, the role of the state and the private corporations, and climate change mobilized various groups of actors and opinions, shaping the public debate and the concerns about immediate economic advancement or the future of natural resources in the long term. This mobilization involved a significant part of the country, who expressed their opinion on delicate yet urgent themes like climate justice, economic model and governmentality for the present and the next generations.
This article analyzes the piping of rivers and the closure of traditional canals (navigable and agricultural) in Mexico City between 1930 and 1970. It argues that the expansion of the combined sewer system dissolved the distinctions among rivers, traditional canals, and drainage channels by mixing stormwater and wastewater within a single infrastructure. This integration altered the functions and meanings of surface waters, reshaping the aquatic landscape of the Mexican capital. It further contends that channelization and drainage relied on a hegemonic hygienist discourse that portrayed surface flows as sources of infection. In this context, paving sealed waterways and enabled new roadways, consolidating an urban model oriented toward motorized circulation. The article examines the hydraulic works, regulatory provisions, and institutional actors involved in this process, showing how these technical, sanitary, and political decisions redefined the role of rivers and canals within the combined sewer system.
This paper analyzes how the precepts of hygienism were embodied in Mexico's first sanitary code and how they were implemented in the nation's capital, outlining its scope in the urban environment from its promulgation in 1891 until the fall of the Porfirian regime in 1911. First, it analyzes, based on primary sources, how the principles of hygiene were incorporated into this federal legislation. Then, using primary and secondary sources, it briefly discusses the execution of this regulation and its compliance, examining fragments of daily life and its relationship to the status of sanitary equipment and infrastructure projects. It is evident that the first Mexican health code not only represented the unification of national health regulations into a federal legal framework, but also the institutionalization of medical hygiene discourses aimed at achieving healthy urban environments, becoming one of the emblems of the Porfirian regime's health policy. Although, according to Michel Foucault, the implementation of this federal health legislation represented a biopolitical instrument for exercising Porfirian biopower over the country's public health, its effective enforcement remained beyond the complete control of the State. This was due to two factors: the condition of the health equipment and infrastructure, and the cultural ideology that prevailed at the time regarding the principles of hygiene.
Each certain number of years in the history of Peru dangerous intense rains occur, for this reason, a historical period of time of these intense rains has been investigated in Peru. Therefore, the objective of this research was: to describe categorically informative notes from Lima newspapers about rains in Peru from February to April 2023; so that various communities can prevent and inform themselves. The method was observational, the level was exploratory. The approach was qualitative. The data collection technique was documentary. The data analysis had descriptive content and categorical, all to answer the question: What do the informative notes from Lima newspapers describe about rains in Peru from February to April 2023? As results, we have in the historical period investigated, that due to Cyclone Yaku, rivers overflowed in Lima, Piura and Lambayeque; There were 83 people who died and 247 thousand people affected by rains. The Peruvian economy was damaged by the destruction of roads; and school classes were suspended. And even although the government provided food and financial assistance to the casualties, it was not enough to face the disaster, and there was discontent in the population. As conclusions, there were intense rains in coastal, mountain and jungle regions, in addition, more than 2,000 critical areas were detected in Peru due to landslides. State of emergency was declared in Piura, Tumbes and Lambayeque and in some Lima districts.
Within the framework of the current civilizational crisis and the rise of neoliberalism since the 1980s, the capitalist expansion of tourism seeks new territories and markets to establish its consumption centers. In the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico, Grupo Xcaret has expanded its capital through the creation of these consumptive centers in fragile ecosystems, in jungle and marine settings, while commercially exploiting the cenotes formed by the characteristic karst soils of the region; these have materialized in globalized tourism enterprises, such as theme parks, hotels, tour operators, cruises operators, among others. The research aimed to analyze the capitalist expansion of tourism by Grupo Xcaret, recognizing the socio-environmental effects and power relations generated throughout the historical process. The theoretical-methodological framework is supported by theoretical tools related to environmental history, political ecology, capital accumulation through tourism and accumulation by dispossession. As a result, it is identified that Grupo Xcaret´s expansion, within the prevailing capitalist rationality, has as its guiding axis tourist accumulation, which has generated significant environmental effects and unequal power relations framed by the social resistances of local groups, as well as contradictions arising from the relations between capital and nature in the affected territory of influence due to various projects. It is concluded that the company is representative of expansive dynamics of tourist capital and incessant accumulation, as well as the subsumption of nature, labor, and consumption to the logic of capital.
The lower delta plain of the Paraná River consists of a network of islands and channels located in proximity to the city of Buenos Aires and the River Plate estuary. Historically, these floodable areas have been subjected to numerous interventions due to their significance for agriculture, tourism, and urban development. In previous studies, this history has been divided into four stages based on the use of island territory, and we adopt the following designations: Amerindia, Displacement, Immigration, and Abandonment. However, this article focuses on a less explored aspect: changes in navigation patterns among the islands and interventions in the channels. Additionally, we propose a fifth stage in the delta's history, Repopulation. This contemporary phase began in the late twentieth century with social mobilizations against water pollution in some channels. It is characterized by a subsequent «motorboating boom» of fast boats that occurred in the early twenty-first century. This boom has led to erosion of the channel banks due to the generation of nautical wakes, accidents resulting from boat collisions, channel dredging, and island filling for the construction of nautical neighborhoods.
Seth Garfield is Professor in the Department of History and former director of the Brazil Center at the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research spans Brazilian history, environmental history, commodity history, indigenous policy, and the history of race and ethnicity in Latin America. This interview was conducted by Marcos Colón and is published here in recognition of Garfield's singular contribution to Amazonian environmental history — a body of work that reframes the Amazon not as a passive backdrop to Brazilian modernity, but as a site of contested knowledge, indigenous agency, and ecological consequence that scholarship in this field can no longer afford to ignore.
The objective of this research was to understand the social construction of floods in the Rochdale neighborhood (Osasco), São Paulo state (Brazil) between 1951 and 2023, capturing its impacts and challenges. Against the backdrop of the country's industrialization process and its concentration in Greater São Paulo, combined with the attraction of workers to industry, the growing and disorganized urbanization took on problematic dimensions. During this period, the neighborhood on São João Island was divided into lots and occupied. The then-Rochdale subdivision, conceived as a cooperative neighborhood, was transformed by capitalist appropriations that shaped it under the ordering of accumulation and the representation of inequality inherent to capitalism, and within it, the problem of flooding grew. To this end, the historiography on the themes involved in the problematization, as well as primary material such as legislation and periodicals (newspapers and magazines), were analyzed. The findings demonstrate the social construction of floods, based on human and material losses, the urgency, and the implementation of public policies to address them. While these policies do not resolve the incidents, they appear to introduce initial indications of a possible gentrification process in the region resulting from government action in addressing the floods.
This paper investigates how the Ticuna and Marubo Indigenous peoples, located in the Alto Solimões region of the Brazilian Amazon, have been facing the impacts of the climate crisis through ancestral practices and traditional technologies for caring for the land, forest, and rivers. The research is grounded in the fields of Environmental History and the History of the Anthropocene, weaving together Indigenous and academic knowledge to understand these peoples' strategies of adaptation and resistance in the face of increasingly extreme climate events such as droughts, wildfires, and shortages of food and water. Through the analysis of oral narratives, documents, and community experiences, the study highlights how Indigenous cosmologies offer concrete alternatives to the dominant developmentalist and extractivist logic. By recognizing the value of Indigenous epistemologies, the paper points to the urgency of public policies that engage with these knowledges and to the need for climate justice that is simultaneously social, territorial, and epistemic.
This article examines the relationship between armed conflict and environmental degradation in Colombia between 1964 and 2025, particularly in strategic areas such as the Amazon, the Orinoco region, and the Pacific coast. Using a qualitative, descriptive-analytical approach based on documentary, institutional, and scientific sources, it analyzes the ecological impacts of prolonged violence. The findings reveal that the post-agreement narrative has rendered persistent socio-environmental disputes invisible, and that territorial peace requires a comprehensive ecological dimension, with public policies aimed at environmental reparation, the protection of environmental leaders, and the guarantee of territorial rights for rural, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant communities.
From 1894 to 1906, the Honduran press waged a campaign against dogs that consisted of debasing these animals by presenting them as a problem of urban hygiene and calling for their annihilation. The country's authorities responded to the newspapers' enthusiasm and began killing dogs in urban centers. The extermination of dogs caused additional hygiene problems, and the press denounced these processes, although it continued to call for the killing of dogs. This article describes the impact that media pressure had on the launching of dog extermination campaigns in Honduras. Sources from the time consulted in the National Archives of Honduras are used, specifically the newspapers La Regeneración, El 5 de Julio, El Diario and Diario de Honduras.
In the Santa Ana and Fray Luís Amigó neighborhoods of Palmira city (Valle del Cauca, Colombia), some indicators of the ecological functions performed by residential green infrastructure (RGI) at the neighborhood scale were contrasted to determine its contribution to the environment in each context. An environmental analysis of the IVR was carried out in the studied neighborhoods for a 10-year period, using high-resolution multispectral satellite images, and a structured instrument was applied to understand the residents' perception in the studied neighborhoods on some environmental variables. Patterns were found in the relationship between soil surface temperature and climatic and vegetation factors, which evidenced the essential role of RGI in environmental perception and the well-being of residents. In the Santa Ana neighborhood, with greater vegetation cover, including front gardens, vegetation improves the quality of the environment and positively influences human well-being and the general satisfaction of its inhabitants. In contrast, limitations in vegetation cover in Fray Luís Amigó showed lower benefits. All these results underline the need to integrate more RGI in low-vegetation urban contexts.
This article aims to analyze the exploitation of jaborandi in the Amazon, highlighting its historical appropriation and the associated socio-environmental impacts. The study discusses how the plant, traditionally used by indigenous peoples, was integrated into global pharmaceutical production chains beginning in the 19th century, culminating in the intensification of extraction during the 20th century. The text examines the role of the Merck company, which monopolized the exploitation of jaborandi in Brazil, and the creation of Vegetex to ensure the supply of raw materials. Furthermore, it addresses the relationship between this activity and contemporary slave labor, especially in southern Pará, where workers were subjected to degrading conditions. Through the analysis of documents, testimonies, and news reports, the article reveals how the search for jaborandi contributed to the perpetuation of labor exploitation and environmental degradation in the Amazon.
Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ is a key document on the socio-environmental crisis, whose transformative core lies in "integral ecology"—the inseparable connection between social and environmental problems—and the call for an "ecological conversion." This article aims to identify how these two concepts are articulated as the encyclical's central proposal to address this crisis, moving beyond a simple ecological denunciation. A qualitative methodology was employed, involving an exhaustive documentary analysis and a discourse analysis of Laudato Si’, focusing on the chapters concerning "integral ecology" and "ecological conversion." The results indicate that the encyclical proposes "integral ecology" as a new paradigm of justice linking environmental, social, and human crises, and promotes a personal, community, and structural "ecological conversion." It is concluded that Laudato Si’ is a call to rethink humanity's place and act with generosity, urging changes in lifestyles, production, consumption, and effective global governance in the face of weak political responses and faith in purely technological solutions.
The conservation of the Amazon and other tropical forests, along with the recognition of their peoples, has gained increasing prominence in light of global climate crises and the dominance of capitalist economic systems. These human experiences – ancestral, diverse, and contemporaneous with modern social life – establish a distinct socio-natural metabolism. This study aims to analyze this complementary relationships and socio-environmental conflicts surrounding fishing – an essential element of Amazonian riverine mode of lifes – in the ethno-region of the Lower Rio Branco, in the state of Roraima, Brazil, which comprises sixteen traditional communities. The case study focused on the Lago Grande community, located along the Xeruini River in the municipality of Caracaraí, with fieldwork conducted between July and August 2023. The methodology employed participant observation, interviews, life histories, other ethnobiological methods, and geoprocessing techniques to explore: (i) the use and appropriation of commons and environmental resources, (ii) local ways of life, and (iii) environmental management. Data on family genealogy, public policies, and livelihoods were collected from residents of both sexes, aged 16 to 67, with Indigenous backgrounds from Brazil and Peru. The primary productive activities in Lago Grande include fishing, agriculture, hunting, forest extraction, handicrafts, commerce, and tourism, all organized within a family-based agroecosystem framework. From a Political Ecology perspective, the study reveals conflicts between riverine populations and conservationist public policies – aligned with neo-colonial and developmentalist agendas – which have transformed the region into protected natural areas while continuing to favor capitalist interests linked to national and international sport fishing (catch and release) tourism. This work seeks to advance an ‘turn’ in local public policy by foregrounding riverine socioterritorial identity and affirming the epistemic and political value of traditional knowledges and practices.
