Suchergebnisse

Mexico City's municipal "green" bonds (MGBs), issued in 2016 and 2018, financed two water infrastructure projects embedded in the city's hydrosocial cycle (the reciprocal transformation of water and society). The issuance of the MGBs created an entanglement of "green" debt and water circulation, which the city government touted as a successful "green" intervention for climate action. However, this article argues that the MGBs also masked climate injustices and colonial legacies that were already prevalent in Mexico City's water circulation infrastructure, affecting aspects including socio-economic and gender issues. To substantiate this claim, this article adopts climate coloniality and climate justice as analytical lenses and urban political ecology as a methodology to critically examine the "green" label epistemologies and climate action narratives that justify the issuance of MGBs linked to water infrastructure projects.

La Agencia de Naciones Unidas del Agua celebró en 2012 el día del «Agua y la Seguridad Alimentaria», destacando que las personas beben de 2 a 4 litros de agua/día; sin embargo, la mayor parte del agua se encuentra en los alimentos consumidos. El objetivo del estudio es comparar el abastecimiento, frecuencia y tratamiento del agua con los niveles de inseguridad alimentaria y hambre (IAH) en hogares. Es una investigación descriptiva y trasversal, realizada en 1.251 hogares localizados en zonas suburbanas de Caracas, Venezuela. Por medio de encuestas se obtuvo información sobre el abastecimiento, frecuencia y tratamiento del agua, además del nivel de seguridad alimentaria, clasificada según la presencia o no de inseguridad, manejo de recursos y hogares con experiencias de hambre. Se utilizó el paquete SPSS v19 para el tratamiento estadístico descriptivo y bivariado. En total 58,11% de hogares presentó algún nivel de inseguridad alimentaria y hasta 61,5% problemas en la periodicidad del acceso al agua. Los hogares con IAH moderada-severa presentaron un abastecimiento y periodicidad inadecuada de 72 y 77% respectivamente (p < 0,001). A medida que aumenta la inseguridad alimentaria, el abastecimiento, la periodicidad y el tratamiento de agua resultó más inadecuada (p < 0,001). La IAH vincula el acceso, uso y calidad del agua por su estrecha relación en la producción, preparación y consumo de alimentos. Políticas de protección en el uso del agua deben complementar aquellas que alivian la IAH. El reto es producir más alimentos, de mejor calidad y con menos agua. ; The Agency Water held in 2012 on «Water and Food Security,» noting that people drink 2 to 4 liters of water/day; however, most of our drinking water is incorporated into the food eaten. The aim of the study is to compare the access, frequency and treatment of water with food insecurity and hunger (FIH) in households. The research is descriptive and cross-sectional, taken in 1,251 households located in sub-urban neighborhoods in Caracas (Venezuela), where there was access, frequency and quality of water treatment in 1,251 households classified by FIH. Through face-to-face interviews we gathered data related with access, frequency and quality treatment of water and food security and hunger, which was classified according to the level of insecurity, management of resources and presence of hunger. SPSS v19 was used for the descriptive and bi-variable statistical analysis. Main results reveal that 58.11% of the households were food insecure and 61.5% had problems with the frequency of water. Households with moderate-severe insecurity face an inadequate access and frequency in 72 and 77% respectively (p < 0.001). When the FIH increases, the access, frequency and quality treatment is less adequate (p < 0.001). The FIH links access, use and water quality, through close association in the production, preparation and consumption of food. Protection policies on water use should complement those that relieve IAH. The challenge is to produce more food, better and with less water. ; L'Agence de l'Eau des Nations Unies a célébré en 2012 le jour de «L'Eau et la Sécurité Alimentaire», soulignant que les personnes boivent entre 2 et 4 litres d'eau par jour ; cependant, la majeure partie de l'eau consommée vient des aliments que l'on mange. L'objectif de cette étude descriptive est de comparer l'approvisionnement, la fréquence et le traitement de l'eau avec les niveaux d'insécurité alimentaire et de faim des foyères (avec l'IAH), sur un échantillon de 1.251 foyers de Caracas, au Venezuela. On utilise le logiciel SPSS v19 pour l'analyse statistique et descriptive des variables. On a trouvé que 58,11% de ménages avait un certain niveau d'insécurité alimentaire et jusqu'`a 61,5% avait des problèmes d'accès irrégulier à l'eau potable. Les ménages avec un IAH modéré- sévère ont un approvisionnement et une fréquence faible de 72 et 77% respectivement (p < 0,001). Au fur et à mesure que l'insécurité alimentaire augmentent, l'approvisionnement, la fréquence et le traitement de l'eau sont de moins en moins suffisants (p < 0,001). L'IAH est un indicateur qui met en rapport l'accès, l'utilisation et la qualité de l'eau, avec la production, préparation et consommation des aliments. Ainsi les politiques visant la protection des eaux doivent complémenter celles qui tendent à soulager l'IAH. Le défi en fin de compte, c'est de produire plus d'aliments, de meilleur qualité mais en utilisant moins d'eau. ; A Agência de Água das Nações Unidas realizada em 2012 sobre «Água e Segurança Alimentar». O objetivo é chamar a atenção para uma em cada seis pessoas no mundo que não têm acesso a fontes adequadas da água. O propósito do estudo é comparar o acesso, freqüência e qualidade dos níveis de tratamento de água de insegurança alimentar e fome (IAH) em domicílios. É uma pesquisa descritiva e transversal, realizado em 1251 domicílios em áreas suburbanas de Caracas (Venezuela). Através de pesquisas sobre o acesso, a freqüência, o tratamento de água de qualidade e do nível de segurança alimentar, classificados de acordo com a presença ou ausência de insegurança, gestão de recursos e as famílias sentir fome foi obtida. SPSS v19 foi utilizado para análise estatística descritiva e bivariada. No total, 58% dos domicílios tinham algum nível de problemas de insegurança alimentar e até 61% na freqüência de acesso à água. Domicílios com moderada a grave IAH tiveram acesso inadequado e freqüência de 72% e 77%, respectivamente (p < 0,001), enquanto que aqueles com experiência de fome em adultos e 75% das crianças tiveram freqüência inadequada de acesso à água. À medida que aumenta o IAH, o acesso, freqüência e qualidade de tratamento de água foi mais inadequada (p < 0,001). O IAH está ligada ao acesso, uso e qualidade da água, a sua estreita relação com a produção, preparação e consumo de alimentos. Políticas de proteção são necessários no uso da água como uma das políticas transversais que aliviam IAH. O desafio é produzir mais alimentos, melhor e com menos água. ; 53-64 ; jbernal@usb.ve ; gabiavil@yahoo.com ; rahernan@usb.ve ; haherrera@usb.ve ; zilymontoya@usb.ve ; semestral

The 2008 financial crisis opened the doors of green capitalism as a financially sound approach to saving the planet from the worst effects of the climate emergency. The emphasis on the role of finance in promoting "green growth" has permeated mainstream political, academic and business approaches to climate change adaptation and mitigation, assuming multiple forms - from the carbon markets of the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, to the Environmental, Social and Governance taxonomy for "green" investments, to the proliferation of sustainable labels in several economic sectors. The present article offers a critical appraisal of one of the most prominent arguments that upholds the idea that it is possible and desirable to achieve sustainability and economic growth through finance: green bonds. Green bonds are debt instruments whose proceeds are earmarked to fund projects with supposedly environmental benefits. After some years in the background, they now occupy a central position in the green recovery narrative and political framework all over the world. Most of the academic literature tends to naturalize green bonds as an eminently technical solution to reconcile economic growth and environmental sustainability. Filling an epistemological gap, the present article leverages a world-ecology approach to embed the financial phenomenon of green bonds within the broader picture of the capitalist political economy and the expansion of its ecological frontier. In light of the ongoing experiences that the authors have been following in the Brazilian legal, financial and political context, the article unpacks and makes sense of green bonds as a tool in the hands of climate finance that reproduces global patterns of North-South uneven development and the shifting of ecological costs. To test the potential of the "interpretative framework" offered by a world-ecology approach, we mobilize it in the concrete case of green bonds issuances directed to fund the forestry sector in Brazil. Aware that the current phenomenon only represents a blip in comparison to the largeer temporal (the longue dureé) and spatial (the world system) scales usually deployed by world-ecology, we nonetheless discuss how the ideological, technical and power dynamics behind the issuance of green bonds unleash capital accumulation, produce a financialized and subordinated construction of nature, and entail an institutional arrangement. The article is organized around 3 main sections. After the introduction, section 1 describes green bonds as one of the most fashionable financial topics of the moment, and one that promotes a shift in discourses towards the need of actively building a "green economy". Although from a legal standpoint green bonds embody no significant difference from regular bonds, our focus is to describe the promises around them, the current (private) governance structure, and the trends in the issuance of these debt instruments both in the Global North and South, with a specific focus on the case of Brazil. In section 2, we look at the operations of green bonds emissions on the ground, i.e. taking as an example the context of green debt underpinning the Brazilian forestry sector. The analysis reveals how the emissions, made predominantly by large multinational companies actively present on the global market, feed off great efforts deployed by both the public and the private sector in constructing an image of the sector as a key player in the emergent "bioeconomy" and in the strengthening of Brazil's goals in the Paris Agreement. However, we describe how green bond revenues that are officially committed to the implementation of "sustainable management of forests" are associated with the expansion of the ecological frontier in the Brazilian territory, stretching the boundaries of the area dedicated to tree plantations and amplifying social and environmental tensions. The backstage of the emissions shows how capital accumulation through green bonds is associated with the co-production of nature for the purpose of accumulation, generating concerns that are often diluted or transformed into procedural requirements. Debt generated by the subscription of green bonds, we argue, is not only financial, but also social and ecological. In section 3, we put forward that for private accumulation to be successful, green bonds in the forestry sector demand an institutional arrangement that combines state support and private governance of debt in its financial, social and ecological dimensions. Rather than being the result of an idealized and spontaneous market, a set of institutional transformations have to be considered in order to comprehend the feasibility of green bonds in the Brazilian forestry sector. We thus describe the historic connection between forestry and the state, the endless public incentives to put nature to work, the functional adaptations of the Brazilian environmental legislation and the regulation concerning the demarcation, access and use of land. In this context, we argue that green bonds add yet a new institutional layer to the process of creating and validating specific forms of nature, through a governance structure that dilutes the tensions between the promise of environmental benefits and its concrete negative social and environmental impacts. We conclude the article by reassembling these findings as part of the capitalist world ecology "dialectical unity" of capital accumulation, co-production of nature and power. We suggest that the world-ecology approach allows us to grasp green bonds as a complex form that has so far been ignored in the relevant literature. As any other phenomenon of financialization, a green bond should not be understood in isolation from its material basis, since it is from that basis – and its social and environmental conditions and contradictions – that it appropriates value. As the example of the Brazilian forestry sector illuminates, the "greenness" of the financial debt inscribed in green bonds may come into existence at the expense of the social and environmental debt that underlie the forestry sector productive model. Hence, although the explicit inclusion of "environmental concerns" into financial considerations and project implementation has been praised as a step towards the recognition that finance has a material impact on the planet and that these externalities shall be accounted for, the article warns of the typical green arithmetic move put forward by green bonds. Green bonds inevitably co-produce nature and social relations, but in a very unequal way that emphasizes capital accumulation and that does not necessarily protect the environment (even when standards are introduced). Much to the contrary, green bonds may come into being at the expense of other ways of living ecologically, and by restoring injustices of the past and creating a regenerative future - in other words, by creating debt.

The 2008 financial crisis opened the doors of green capitalism as a financially sound approach to saving the planet from the worst effects of the climate emergency. The emphasis on the role of finance in promoting "green growth" has permeated mainstream political, academic and business approaches to climate change adaptation and mitigation, assuming multiple forms - from the carbon markets of the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, to the Environmental, Social and Governance taxonomy for "green" investments, to the proliferation of sustainable labels in several economic sectors. The present article offers a critical appraisal of one of the most prominent arguments that upholds the idea that it is possible and desirable to achieve sustainability and economic growth through finance: green bonds. Green bonds are debt instruments whose proceeds are earmarked to fund projects with supposedly environmental benefits. After some years in the background, they now occupy a central position in the green recovery narrative and political framework all over the world. Most of the academic literature tends to naturalize green bonds as an eminently technical solution to reconcile economic growth and environmental sustainability. Filling an epistemological gap, the present article leverages a world-ecology approach to embed the financial phenomenon of green bonds within the broader picture of the capitalist political economy and the expansion of its ecological frontier. In light of the ongoing experiences that the authors have been following in the Brazilian legal, financial and political context, the article unpacks and makes sense of green bonds as a tool in the hands of climate finance that reproduces global patterns of North-South uneven development and the shifting of ecological costs. To test the potential of the "interpretative framework" offered by a world-ecology approach, we mobilize it in the concrete case of green bonds issuances directed to fund the forestry sector in Brazil. Aware that the current phenomenon only represents a blip in comparison to the largeer temporal (the longue dureé) and spatial (the world system) scales usually deployed by world-ecology, we nonetheless discuss how the ideological, technical and power dynamics behind the issuance of green bonds unleash capital accumulation, produce a financialized and subordinated construction of nature, and entail an institutional arrangement. The article is organized around 3 main sections. After the introduction, section 1 describes green bonds as one of the most fashionable financial topics of the moment, and one that promotes a shift in discourses towards the need of actively building a "green economy". Although from a legal standpoint green bonds embody no significant difference from regular bonds, our focus is to describe the promises around them, the current (private) governance structure, and the trends in the issuance of these debt instruments both in the Global North and South, with a specific focus on the case of Brazil. In section 2, we look at the operations of green bonds emissions on the ground, i.e. taking as an example the context of green debt underpinning the Brazilian forestry sector. The analysis reveals how the emissions, made predominantly by large multinational companies actively present on the global market, feed off great efforts deployed by both the public and the private sector in constructing an image of the sector as a key player in the emergent "bioeconomy" and in the strengthening of Brazil's goals in the Paris Agreement. However, we describe how green bond revenues that are officially committed to the implementation of "sustainable management of forests" are associated with the expansion of the ecological frontier in the Brazilian territory, stretching the boundaries of the area dedicated to tree plantations and amplifying social and environmental tensions. The backstage of the emissions shows how capital accumulation through green bonds is associated with the co-production of nature for the purpose of accumulation, generating concerns that are often diluted or transformed into procedural requirements. Debt generated by the subscription of green bonds, we argue, is not only financial, but also social and ecological. In section 3, we put forward that for private accumulation to be successful, green bonds in the forestry sector demand an institutional arrangement that combines state support and private governance of debt in its financial, social and ecological dimensions. Rather than being the result of an idealized and spontaneous market, a set of institutional transformations have to be considered in order to comprehend the feasibility of green bonds in the Brazilian forestry sector. We thus describe the historic connection between forestry and the state, the endless public incentives to put nature to work, the functional adaptations of the Brazilian environmental legislation and the regulation concerning the demarcation, access and use of land. In this context, we argue that green bonds add yet a new institutional layer to the process of creating and validating specific forms of nature, through a governance structure that dilutes the tensions between the promise of environmental benefits and its concrete negative social and environmental impacts. We conclude the article by reassembling these findings as part of the capitalist world ecology "dialectical unity" of capital accumulation, co-production of nature and power. We suggest that the world-ecology approach allows us to grasp green bonds as a complex form that has so far been ignored in the relevant literature. As any other phenomenon of financialization, a green bond should not be understood in isolation from its material basis, since it is from that basis – and its social and environmental conditions and contradictions – that it appropriates value. As the example of the Brazilian forestry sector illuminates, the "greenness" of the financial debt inscribed in green bonds may come into existence at the expense of the social and environmental debt that underlie the forestry sector productive model. Hence, although the explicit inclusion of "environmental concerns" into financial considerations and project implementation has been praised as a step towards the recognition that finance has a material impact on the planet and that these externalities shall be accounted for, the article warns of the typical green arithmetic move put forward by green bonds. Green bonds inevitably co-produce nature and social relations, but in a very unequal way that emphasizes capital accumulation and that does not necessarily protect the environment (even when standards are introduced). Much to the contrary, green bonds may come into being at the expense of other ways of living ecologically, and by restoring injustices of the past and creating a regenerative future - in other words, by creating debt. ; El presente artículo parte de un enfoque de ecología-mundo para develar y dar sentido a los bonos verdes como una herramienta en manos de las finanzas climáticas, que reproduce los patrones globales de desarrollo desigual y acumulación capitalista. A través del estudio de las emisiones de bonos verdes dirigidas a financiar el sector forestal en Brasil, se revisa cómo la dinámica ideológica, técnica y de poder detrás de dichas emisiones desencadena la acumulación de capital, y produce una construcción de la naturaleza financiarizada y subordinada. Actualmente, los bonos verdes son una de las formas más destacadas de la economía verde para intentar conciliar la "sostenibilidad ambiental" con el crecimiento dentro de los parámetros de las finanzas. Como instrumentos de deuda cuyos ingresos van destinados a financiar proyectos con supuestos beneficios ambientales, los bonos verdes ocupan ya una posición central en la narrativa y el marco político de la economía verde. El artículo reseña los bonos verdes, como uno de los temas financieros relevantes del momento, y describe las promesas y tendencias de emisiones de estos bonos, tanto en los países del Norte y del Sur, y específicamente en Brasil. Al observar las emisiones concretas en el sector forestal brasileño, el artículo muestra cómo la acumulación de capital a través de bonos verdes se asocia a coproducir la naturaleza en formas problemáticas, tanto social como ambientalmente, generando deuda no solo financiera, sino esencialmente social y ecológica. Con una combinación de enfoques micro y macro del tema, el artículo explica cómo los bonos verdes en el sector forestal exigen un arreglo institucional que combine el apoyo estatal y la gobernanza privada de la deuda en sus ámbitos financiero, social y ecológico, para que la acumulación se produzca en tales términos. Se sugiere, sin pretensión de universalidad, que el caso de los bonos verdes en el sector forestal en Brasil es un fenómeno financiero y ecológico novedoso, e ilumina el rompecabezas del capitalismo en la trama de la vida y el análisis de las nuevas fronteras de la miseria planificada.