Breathe
By Evlyn Cervantes Silva
"What you do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make."
Jane Goodall
It is useless to deny it: the government of the Fourth Transformation headed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is annihilating the environmental sector to the point of sinking it into a disarticulation of institutions that already permeates inoperative administrative processes and an unprecedented setback in public policy on the environment.
One year before the end of the first six-year term governed by Morena and in the run-up to the electoral effervescence, it is worthwhile to focus on what happened with Mexico's environmental policy during the current administration and then make a very deep analysis of how the natural heritage of Mexicans is being managed, because our resilience to the impacts of climate change will depend to a large extent on it.
The importance of the issue is indisputable, it cannot be ignored because the country is already facing significant deterioration processes in its natural resources and whoever assumes the responsibility of governing Mexico in 2024 will have to consider whether to continue or modify the environmental policy of the current government to make a clear difference from its predecessor.
As part of World Environment Day, which is commemorated every June 5, we published in Mexicanos Contra La Corrupción y la Impunidad (MCCI) the report: Killing the future, the 4T and the end of Mexico's environmental policy which showed that the institutional disarticulation of the environmental sector has visible consequences, as many of the obligations of the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat) and its decentralized bodies have been rendered inoperative.
For example, there are delays in administrative processes such as the issuance of forestry documentation to prove the legal origin of timber products, the renewal of authorizations, environmental impact assessment procedures, the issuance of inspection and surveillance reports, as well as the integration of user files that are submitted to the central offices on a daily basis.
To give an example of the distortion in the environmental sector, currently 7 out of every 10 pesos labeled to address the harmful effects of the destruction of ecosystems are dedicated to programs that do not have a positive impact on the environment, such as the Mayan Train. In addition, environmental specialists have been replaced in the technical work by well-known political and electoral operators.
This is a report that, based on the analysis of the budget, interviews with specialists and the evaluation of the work and policies of the institutions involved, shows how the human right to the environment is violated by the State. I invite you to read it in full at www.contralacorrupcion.mx
As a mega-diverse country and at the same time very vulnerable to the effects of climate change, no one can be indifferent to what is happening with Mexico's environmental policy.
*Journalist Evlyn Cervantes Silva has a degree in Communication Sciences from Universidad La Salle Bajío and a master's degree in Political Journalism from the Carlos Septién García School of Journalism.
Currently her journalistic work is focused on covering environmental issues and socio-environmental conflicts in Mexico with special emphasis on topics such as corruption, gender perspective, trafficking, depletion of natural resources and local solutions to climate change.
She is the general director of www.evlyn.online, an environmental journalism platform of which she is the founder and is part of the investigation team of Mexicanos Contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
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