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Inaction brings Mexico closer to climate collapse, alert book

Inaction brings Mexico closer to climate collapse, alert book

The climate crisis will have in Mexico more serious repercussions than the coronavirus pandemic due to institutional and business inaction in the face of forest felling, air pollution or the destruction of ecosystems, warns the book “Mexico Collapse”.

Through eight chronicles prepared by journalists who work in the region, the work offers a local look at the climate crisis through official data and testimonies from its victims and perpetrators.

Carlos Carabaña and Alejandro Melgoza, authors of two of the stories, explained in an interview with EFE that, after years in which institutions have avoided addressing the climate crisis, Mexico has gone from a stage of mitigation to another of adaptation to a new reality.

“Most of the world’s governments, until they have had the world on top of them, have not reacted. For decades it has been a problem for the Mexico of the future”exposed Carabana.

Melgoza delved into one of what they considered to be the main causes of the debacle: the lax application of the rules that regulate the activities of large companies.

READ ALSO: The fossil industry spent 4 million on “climate misinformation” at COP27

“Governments have hoped that, in good will, the large contributors of emissions, such as mining or thermoelectric companies, declare the damage they are doing, when it should be an oversight imposition of the State”indicated.

Since 2012, the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection (Profepa) had only collected 11% of the sanctions imposed on companies for their climate malpractice.

“What the prosecutor’s offices do is bend and give them an opportunity through commutations, so that they commit to carrying out environmental projects that are often phantom”denounced Melgoza.

Despite avoiding catastrophizing, both agreed that what we are experiencing is only the version “demo” of the coming ruin.

READ ALSO: Executives and economists anticipate recession at the start of Davos

Mexican biodiversity in danger

“Mexico Collapse”edited by Grijalbo, travels through the different scenarios in which the climate crisis is most palpable in the region: air pollution in the Valley of Mexico, floods in Tabasco, fishing exploitation in Sinaloa or migratory phenomena caused by disasters natural, among others.

Although the general trend is to see a battle between good guys and bad guys, the authors opted for a broader vision.

Melgoza traveled to the southern state of Chiapas, where one of the sections of the Mayan Train will pass, the emblematic work of the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and followed the trail of the jaguars that inhabit the jungle, threatened by an environmental impact that since the Executive deny.

“Seeing black and white clouds perspective. For what a train means in terms of mobility and development, we cannot see it as the worst thing in the world. But neither with the excessive optimism that they have marked since the Presidency “said the reporter.

READ ALSO: Mexico, the United States and Canada agree to substitute 25% of their imports from Asia

With the jaguar as the leitmotif, Melgoza’s chronicle also questions the future of the other species of fauna and flora that inhabit the most important jungle in the country and denounces the lack of government consultations with the native communities that inhabit the territories for which that the train will pass

Carabaña, for his part, documented the multiple realities behind the legal and illegal logging of Mexican forests. Throughout the country, alert, there are 122 areas in critical deforestation processes.

“We tend to see defenders against illegal loggers, when in general they are people who often just survive. They live in areas where the state has abandoned them.”he explained.

The journalist traveled to communities in the states of Hidalgo, Puebla and Michoacán, where he portrayed the cemetery of trees that the region has become and its most obvious consequence, the destruction of biodiversity.

But he also delved into what underlies the mere fact of cutting down a tree, such as social tensions between neighbors or the presence of organized crime.

READ ALSO: Climate crisis and poverty threaten millions of children in Latin America

The risk of being an activist

In 2021, the Global Witness organization declared Mexico the most dangerous country for defenders of the climate environment after the 54 murders registered that year. In 2022, according to Comité Cerezo México, two environmental activists were extrajudicially executed.

“It is not that the companies are going to have someone killed, many times they engineer conflicts: they create the conditions for problems to occur in the communities themselves”said Carabana.

Finally, Melgoza criticized the lack of results of the Escazú Agreement on environmental preservation and the dangerous context to which institutional abandonment has led activists.

Source: EFE

Source: Gestion

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