This week, Mexico presents its new pollution mitigation targets at the annual meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Conference of the Parties (COP30), held in Belém, Brazil. The goal? This third Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) aims to reduce net carbon dioxide emissions by at least 31% to 37% by 2035. “There is no time to waste, any delay translates into irreparable losses and damage, into human lives, into devastated ecosystems, into communities at risk,” said Environment Secretary Alicia Bárcena at the end of the plenary session of the Climate Leaders Summit in Brazil. The problem? We will have to see if this time the country will be able to achieve its objectives. So far, Mexico has been unable to achieve the goals of its previous NDCs.
The NDC is the plan by which each country shows how it will contribute to achieving the goals set in the 2015 Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming to below two degrees Celsius. Currently, greenhouse gas emissions amount to approximately 583 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year and the objective that Mexico has set itself, in the absence of international aid, is to lower them to between 364 and 404 million tonnes by 2035; while, if there was international cooperation, the reduction would be between 332 and 363 million tons. An ambitious goal, even more so if we take into account that Mexico failed to respect the first NDC to which it had committed, much less.
In the document Climate change mitigation and adaptation commitments for the period 2020-2030presented in 2015, a series of goals were set for 2024. In the energy sector, it was planned to produce 35% with clean energy, but according to the latest report, Mexico generated only 26.5% of the total with clean energy in 2024. Another goal was to reduce methane leaks, venting and controlled combustion by 25%, but these decreased by only 8%. Nor has it been possible for industry to replace heavy fuels with natural gas, clean energy and biomass: petroleum products have gone from 25% to 31%, according to different editions of the ‘National Energy Balance’.
The Climate Action Tracker, an independent science project that tracks climate action by 39 countries plus the European Union and measures it against the Paris Agreement goal, rates Mexico’s actions as “critically insufficient.” This is the worst level, which it shares with nine other nations such as the United States, Russia, Türkiye or Argentina.
“The ‘critically insufficient’ rating indicates that Mexico’s policies and commitments lead to an increase, rather than a decrease, in emissions; if all countries followed Mexico’s approach, global warming would exceed four degrees,” the report said. “The use of fossil fuels is a priority and policies and institutions related to climate change have been dismantled under the discourse of energy security and republican austerity,” he adds.
Key sticking points include, among others, subsidies for fossil fuels, the fact that federal budgets dedicate around 70% of resources intended to fight climate change to fossil gas infrastructure, or that electricity auctions for renewable energy have been canceled. They also highlight that updating the targets to 2022 has resulted in higher levels of emissions compared to the first edition.
They also remember that that year, when then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador presented his “decalogue of actions in the fight against climate change,” point seven was “the modernization of six refineries has begun, we have acquired another in Texas, and we are about to inaugurate a new refinery in Dos Bocas, Tabasco, Mexico,” and point eight was two new coke ovens to convert fuel oil into gasoline.
Now as Mexico presents actions to comply with its new NDC, it is assumed that Climate Action Tracker will reassess the country, now with President Sheinbaum at the helm, a profile much more similar to the environmental sector than that of López Obrador.
According to what was published by the Ministry of the Environment, “NDC 3.0 incorporates a new reduction target that will put Mexico on the path to net zero emissions by mid-century.” It is unclear how it will achieve this goal, if Mexico has an expansive policy on the use of hydrocarbons, plans to seek larger oil reserves using hydraulic fracturing and, of its 35 electricity generation plants under construction, the vast majority use fossil fuels, with a useful life of at least 30 years. That is, they will be operational beyond the half-century in which Mexico commits not to release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
