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The University of the Americas Puebla (UDLAP) tested 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. A group of researchers has carefully analyzed, country by country, what the region is doing to mitigate climate change and improve access to climate justice. However, the results are not as ambitious as the critical situation requires. The average of this performance is 54.86 (out of 100), according to the Environmental Impunity Index 2023 presented this Wednesday in the Mexican Senate. The region invests only 0.18% of GDP in environmental protection, even though warming affects it disproportionately. “This lack of funding actually reflects the lack of political will,” laments Azucena Cháidez Montenegro, director of SIMO Consulting and co-author of the index. “Although there is agreement that action is needed, the institutional response lacks force and resources.”
This report estimates that climate migration is the most pressing consequence of the lack of political will to take climate action. According to a 2021 census report, at least 1.18 million people in the region have been internally displaced due to climatic factors. At the top of this list is Brazil: almost half a million people migrated inland due to climate-related disasters. In Haiti there are around 220,000, in Cuba 194,000 and in Uruguay 160,000. For Celeste Cedillo, UDLAP research professor and co-author of the index, these numbers are “very scary” and she warns that they are “data that keeps growing.”
According to the index, institutional capacity is one of the most diverse parameters examined between countries. Bolivia (58.8), Mexico (56.6) and Brazil (54.97) have the best results, while Haiti (14.71), St. Vincent (13.27) and Trinidad and Tobago (8.41) perform worst in this category with differences of up to 50 points. In the research, Cháidez explains, they worked hard to develop scales that could compare countries like Brazil and Barbados with very different population densities, budgets and political characteristics. The aim of the index is to put all countries in front of a mirror and draw a roadmap for optimizing public policy and environmental justice.
The enormous gaps between nations highlight the level of vulnerability and inequality faced by countries in the region with little state power in environmental matters. “Latin America is an incredibly unequal region inland and this has a direct impact on the social impact of the environmental crisis,” the report said.
Wood was confiscated from an illegal sawmill by Brazil’s environmental agency IBAMA in January 2023. UESLEI MARCELINO (Portal)
Mexico’s failure: good policy, bad results
Although larger countries have better institutional capacity, they perform very poorly when it comes to environmental degradation and crime. Dominica (71.54), Panama (70.92) and St. Vincent (70.21) are in the best places, while Brazil (53.95), Barbados (52.9) and Mexico (45.35) are the take last places. This result suggests that countries with greater resources cannot necessarily ensure that they function effectively or fully guarantee their citizens the right to a healthy environment. For Celeste Cedillo, Mexico is the most paradigmatic example of this: “It has good federal policies, but they fail to anchor them at the subnational level.” That is, the results are not visible at the local level. It’s a very obvious failure.”
Another problem facing Mexico is environmental conflict, ranging from the murder of environmentalists to territorial disputes related to extractivism. Along with Brazil and Colombia, Mexico is the country with the most environmental lawsuits in the region. These three countries account for 49.8%, with Mexico being the most conflicted country in the region at 19.8%. Latin America holds the ignoble title of being the deadliest region for activists, accounting for nine out of 10 of these violent deaths, totaling 1,910 people since 2012.
The lack of legal protection is also a weak point in the region. 63.6% of the countries surveyed do not explicitly recognize the right to a healthy environment in their constitutions and only 9% of the countries have courts specialized in environmental issues.
Miners arrested by the police are evacuated from the illegal mine in Madre de Dios (Peru) in July 2015. Sebastian Castaneda (Getty Images)
For both, all these shortcomings form the concept of environmental impunity. “These are not just crimes that have not been solved. This is because there is no law or it cannot be applied; “It is the inability of the state to develop laws, policies or resources,” Cháidez says by phone. After analyzing more than 50 variables, the index divided the 33 countries into three broad groups according to their scores. Those with medium to low levels of impunity have the best scores (from 64.76 to 59.42) and are: Chile, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Colombia, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, Nicaragua and Panama. They are followed by Venezuela, Mexico, Dominica, El Salvador, Brazil, Cuba, Guyana, St. Kitts and Nevis, Guatemala, Bahamas and Barbados, which agree without much ease. And finally, those with the worst rating: Honduras, St. Lucia, Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Paraguay, Grenada, Haiti, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname.
Cháidez deplores the poorer performance of smaller or lower-income countries, as they are the ones most at risk and most vulnerable to climate change, despite having a minimal contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. towards the atmosphere. For this reason, experts call for greater technical support to these countries in the development of statistics and in the formulation of public policies, institutional change processes and evidence-based risk management and prevention and adaptation systems.
But if there’s one thing they’re trying to influence, it’s the lack of data. And in the best case, there is a lack of comparable information from one country to another. For both, this is Latin America’s biggest Achilles heel. Both said they had to resort to information from civil society organizations that collect data “in response to the institutional vacuum”: “Not reporting the information perpetuates impunity,” replies Cháidez. “This only brings darkness to the processes that need to be evaluated and monitored. And we have found that states are not taking the task of documenting their activities seriously.”