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Next year promises to be an interesting year on environmental issues for Latin America. In the midst of global crises such as climate change and biodiversity loss, governments of the left and with a green narrative began to position themselves in the region in order to have to prove in 2023 whether they are able to fulfill their promises and host several countries under the same flag . Tackling deforestation, a wound dividing the region, will continue to be the challenge that will be on the agenda.
Mexico and the challenge of being non-lethal to environmentalists
Mexico enters 2023 with major environmental challenges. The country became the deadliest for environmentalists and land defenders in 2021, and the trend doesn’t appear to be reversing. In the last decade, Mexico has overtaken Brazil and Colombia on this blacklist, according to Global Witness. In addition, the large budget cuts on the one hand and the government’s commitment to large infrastructure projects on the other collide with sustainability and environmental protection. The Mayan train, which will cross the Yucatan Peninsula, is slated to be inaugurated in December 2023, despite protests from ecologists, archaeologists and indigenous groups opposed to the project, who warn of irreversible damage to the region’s ecosystems. For the construction of section 5 of the works alone, 500 hectares of old-growth forest were cleared. The work, one of the most emblematic of López Obrador’s government, aims to revitalize the economy of Mexico’s southeast, one of the country’s most impoverished regions.
This year 2022 was also a year of severe droughts in Mexico, in the summer 70% of the country suffered from water problems. A severe crisis that has only highlighted the water management problems that have plagued the country for decades. These droughts have created a crisis in the countryside that is directly affecting agricultural production. Another fundamental challenge in Mexico this year has been poor air quality, a silent epidemic that kills between 8,000 and 14,000 people each year in Mexico City alone, the capital and the most densely populated city.
A protester carries a sign in memory of Samir Flores, an environmental activist who was killed in Morelos on February 20, 2019. Carlos Tischler (Getty Images)
Chile wants to be an environmental leader
One of the milestones in environmental affairs in Chile will take place on April 3, when the region’s first meeting of agriculture and environment ministers will be held in the city of Viña del Mar to discuss reducing carbon dioxide emissions and methane in agriculture and waste management. They are convened by the Minister of Agriculture in Gabriel Boric’s government, Esteban Valenzuela. “If methane emissions are not reduced this decade, we will miss the opportunity to avoid warming in the short term. This challenge cannot be met without reducing or curbing emissions from agriculture. And in recent years, technological solutions have emerged that allow countries like Chile, Brazil or the European Union to be the first to produce meat and milk with fewer emissions,” explains Marcelo Mena, director of the Climate Action Center of the Catholic University. from Valparaíso.
Boric’s government will be one year old next March, and according to Mena, one of the challenges is collecting bills related to Chile’s top environmental emergencies: a reform of the environmental impact assessment system to facilitate investments that contribute to decarbonization, an organic waste, contribute law, a new decontamination plan for Santiago de Chile and the update of air quality standards.
Brazil, the turn with Lula
The survival of the Amazon depended in large part on the outcome of Brazil’s elections, and now one of Lula da Silva’s biggest challenges is to stop runaway deforestation: Bolsonaro left behind 45,486 square kilometers of vegetation wiped out, according to official data and a Climate of total impunity in the jungle.
An illegal gold mine in the Amazon jungle in Rondônia state, in a 2021 image.Victor Moriyama / Amazônia em Chamas
Lula promised “zero deforestation,” and to achieve that, the most urgent need will be to rebuild the environmental police and all public environmental protections, which have been virtually dismantled in recent years. There will be very few resources, but Lula will be able to rely on the Amazon Fund, where foreign countries (particularly Germany and Norway) are making donations for forest conservation, an instrument that has been neglected in the last term.
It will also have the renowned experience of Marina Silva, the Minister for the Environment. During Lula’s first administration, which began in 2003, he implemented policies that managed to reduce deforestation by more than 80%. Brazil will also set up a National Climate Authority, a technical cross-section that will ensure all ministries are rowing in the same direction on climate change, and an Indigenous Peoples Ministry that could be staffed by one of the country’s top activists. Sonja Guajajara. The eviction of invaders and the state’s legal recognition of indigenous lands, which have been paralyzed in recent years, will be the main battlefield.
The future of the Amazon and its role in the global climate will be the focus of Brazil’s new “green diplomacy”: Lula wants to gather all Amazon countries for a summit as early as the first half of the new year and have Brazil host COP-30 in 2025.
Sônia Guajajara, future Minister for Indigenous Peoples EVARISTO SA (AFP)
Colombia will measure environmental promises
In 2022, Colombia elected its first left-wing government, that of Gustavo Petro, who not only gave an environmental speech during the election campaign, but also has Francia Márquez, winner of the 2018 Goldman Environment Prize, as vice president. This means that the country faces several challenges in 2023 to deliver on the environmental promise. However, there are two issues that will be crucial. The first is the energy transition, as Petro and Environment Minister Irene Vélez have repeatedly indicated that the country needs to start moving away from its reliance on coal and hydrocarbons. But the way to do it in a fair way, not only considering the fiscal panorama of Colombia – whose income depends to a large extent on this sector – but also with the communities and workers who live from these projects, was not clear. Therefore, this roadmap is expected to become clearer over the next year.
The second challenge that has gone relatively unnoticed in 2022 is deforestation, the biggest driver of Colombia’s greenhouse gas emissions. The Environment Ministry, led by Susana Muhamad, decided to change the previous government’s military strategy against deforestation with the Artemisa mission, which had been heavily criticized for violating the human rights of farming communities. According to the government, the new tool to combat this problem, which has devastated more than three million hectares in the last 20 years, is to take advantage of the land’s vocation in the territories, to promote environmental education and agreements with the communities, so the forests are preserved.
Venezuela, threatened by mining
Venezuela is cornered by the extensive devastation that followed the exploitation of the Orinoco Mining Arc, an area in the south of the country that covers 12% of the national territory and which, by decision of President Nicolás Maduro, is subject to exploitation containing minerals from all articles serious consequences for the Amazon region. It has been five years since the intensive use of this territory was approved, which has allowed the Venezuelan government to generate revenue – with completely opaque administration – in recent years, when the collapse of the oil industry kept production and sales to a minimum, with sanctions financially trapped. What’s happening in the Orinoco Mining Arc is insatiable. This week, Hollywood actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio posted a photo of the scale of the disaster on his social media, reigniting the grievance that hundreds of Venezuelan NGOs have been raising for years. One of these is SOS Orinoco, which is dedicated to thoroughly investigating what happened.
Reports from the United Nations this year have garnered warnings of uncontrolled mining activities in the southern Orinoco that have already exceeded environmental damage and become a serious human rights crisis, with reports of labor and sexual exploitation, slavery and the presence of criminal groups and even the Colombian guerrillas the ELN, which, according to these reports, was involved in the exploitation of gold, coltan, diamonds and bauxite in this vast region with the consent of the Venezuelan authorities.
Bolivia and its forest disturbance
Bolivia has tasks that it carries with it and has neglected for years. The first deals with the deforestation and degradation of the Amazon. The country, along with Brazil, concentrates 90% of disturbances in tropical forests, according to a report presented last September. Invasion or subjugation, along with expanding agricultural frontiers for the cultivation of transgenic crops — by private companies with Executive Branch approval — are the primary cause of deforestation that has caused this country to lose more than six million hectares of forests, what corresponds to a 9.5% decline in tree cover since 2000, according to a report by Global Forest Watch.
The second, which has become more complex over the years, is overseeing gold mining in protected natural areas and indigenous territories. The gold rush has polluted rivers and ecosystems with mercury and endangered the health of the indigenous peoples who inhabit Madidi, one of Bolivia’s largest protected areas covering 1.8 million hectares in the country’s north-west. Chinese and Colombian companies, as well as Bolivian mining cooperatives, a sector enjoying privileges under the current executive – as well as the government of former President Evo Morales – are mining gold with dredgers and mercury, both legally and illegally.