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Facing a dramatic depletion of forests in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, throughout the last decades of colonial rule (between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) the Bourbon administration wrote and published a considerable number of laws, reports, surveys, and ordinances on forest management and conservation. In this paper we examine discourses of forest conservation and the measures applied to preserve this critical resource by colonial official and experts. Drawing on forest laws, ordinances, and reports from national archives in Mexico City, we argue that conservation became part of the concepts which defined how forests were conceptualized and managed, but also that conservation was intrinsic to colonial processes of state-making and territorialization. This paper aims to approach Bourbon officials' understanding of conservation as a complex interrelation between renewed discourses of nature and the practices of colonial forest administration through the idea of indeterminacy. Likewise, it sheds light on patterns that have defined the ways in which forest conservation has been constituted in modern Mexico, addressing a little-studied period in forest management in this country. • Forest conservation was contentious questioning the universality of colonial laws. • Conservation became a site of experimentation to know, govern, and produce forests. • Conservation provides insights into the colonial state's territorial actualization. • Colonial forest laws played an important role in defining the context of depletion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the resistance to shocks (economic, political, outbreaks etc.) of the ecological footprint in EU-5 countries over the period 1961–2016. The aim of the study is to determine whether the ecological footprint tends to return to the average with advanced econometric analysis. Efforts to move towards carbon neutrality, which increased after the Paris Agreement, are important for the countries in our analysis. To achieve our aim, we primarily used traditional and one-break unit root tests, followed by the novel SOR unit root test, which considers both sharp and smooth breaks to achieve robust results. The econometric findings show that EF and its six components (i.e., carbon, cropland, grazing land, forest, built-up land and fishing grounds) all contain unit root except the built-up land footprint for Spain and the grazing land and forest footprint for the United Kingdom. Our study provides policymakers with important information for implementing policies to reduce environmental pollution and achieve the target of carbon neutrality. • This study applies SOR unit root test, which considers both sharp and smooth breaks. • The results confirm efforts to move towards carbon neutrality in EU-5 countries. • The study contemplates policy recommendations aimed to reach carbon neutrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]