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Informed Debate: The Public Battle over Mexico City’s New Airport
by Curtis Runyan
(Washington, DC, April 2003) By all rights, the expanse of marsh grasslands that make up the Texcoco wetlands just outside Mexico City ought to be under six feet of tarmac and concrete. With the current airport hemmed in by the city and unable to expand to meet growing demand for airplane traffic in the capital city, President Vicente Fox decreed in October 2001 that the wetlands would be the site of a new $2.3 billion international airport.
But after a massive outpouring of public dissent – protests, civil disobedience, and even hostage taking – all of that has changed. Now Texcoco, a system of lakes in Aztec times, will remain a stopover point for thousands of birds that migrate to the United States and Canada every year. And the 5,000 poor farming families who have lived on the land around Texcoco for generations are once again free to plant corn and sell their harvests in the city.
“This is one of the best examples in Mexico of how increased access to information and community participation can lead to better decisions – decisions that are more just and better for the environment,” said Isabel Bustillos of Presencia Ciudadana, a Mexican nonprofit group that for the past five years has been promoting civil participation and better access to government information. The group is part of the Access Initiative, an international network of 30 nonprofit organizations brought together by the World Resources Institute, which works to increase citizens’ access to information and promote civil participation in environmental decision-making.
In Mexico, Presencia Ciudadana helped to bring into public light information about a number of competing airport proposals, outlining their environmental and social impacts. This information, in turn, helped to spur public demand for a voice in the decision.
“This is a positive precedent,” said Pedro Cerisola, the minister of transport and communications who is in charge of the airport project. “We are not going to impose decisions. The government is willing to take no for an answer,” he said at a press conference announcing his government’s about-face on Texcoco. “And that is a fundamental change in this country.”
The Mexican government has a history of heavy-handed decision-making and a lack of openness about federal actions. The most notorious example is the Tlatelolco Plaza massacre in 1968. While most historians agree that hundreds of protesting students were shot and killed by the military, to this day details about the killings remain murky. Much of the official information about the incident remains locked away as classified – despite some efforts by President Fox to unearth documents.
The debate over replacing Mexico City’s overburdened Benito Juarez Airport – the busiest in Latin America – has simmered for decades. By 2001, several potential locations were being considered, but information about environmental and social impacts was sparse.
Leading up to the decision, the government had remained characteristically tight-lipped about the process. “We don’t know what information is being used to make this decision,” Christina Alcayaga Nuñez, a former member of the Mexican House of Representatives, told reporters. “And we don’t have access to any government decision-making process.”
In July 2001, Presencia Ciudadana and a number of other environmental organizations convened a forum for officials and scientists to debate the two top airport proposals. Pitting officials from the competing projects against each other helped to increase the flow of information about each site. In Mexico, you have to ask for information, nobody’s going to give it to you, says Bustillos. “And if you don’t have information, how do you say anything or do anything about bad projects?” she said.
Building at Texcoco would force thousands of small farmers off their land, disrupt bird migrations, and destroy fragile wetlands. Environmentalists pushed for a site in the state of Hidalgo called Tizayuca, even though it is situated about 45 miles outside the city – more than twice the distance away as Texcoco.
When Fox chose the Texcoco site in October, the peasant farmers and environmentalists were ready to take action against the decision. The farmers, who had been offered less than $3,000 per acre for their land, held bitter protests, shut down roads, and took hostage the police who were sent in to restore order. Environmentalists petitioned U.S. officials to oppose the project, saying that it violated environmental provisions in NAFTA that require open deliberations. Parties that had been ignored during the decision-making process now made it clear that they wanted the decision reversed. And it was.
Since then, the country has passed the Transparency and Access to Public Information law, which calls for the government to assess and report the environmental impact of its projects. The law is a good start, says Bustillos, even though it does not yet have any regulatory teeth. “In Mexico we have good mechanisms, it’s just that sometimes people don’t use them,” she said.
In the future Presencia Ciudadana plans to focus public attention on two major projects being fast-tracked by the Fox administration: The Plan Puebla Panama Transit project, and the Escalera Nautica Project. The transit plan would run a vast network of roads, rail tracks, and electric lines through the southern, poorer part of the country, and create a free trade zone in the region, which could threaten the region’s rich biodiversity and marginalize the area’s numerous indigenous cultures. The Escalera Nautica Project aims to increase tourism in Baja California, Mexico by building a series of more than 20 ports around the peninsula and on the mainland. The first phase of the project is already underway without environmental permits having been filed.
“At this point, all we know is that these big projects are cooking,” says Bustillos. “We still need more information about them.” (WRI Features, 980 words)
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Curtis Runyan (features@wri.org) is the managing editor of WRI Features, a monthly international news features service on environment and development issues.
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From Industry to Offices: Reducing Emissions and Reducing Costs
by Curtis Runyan
(Washington, DC, April 2003) When consumer products manufacturer SC Johnson looked into boosting corporate environmental performance, the company considered a number of factors, including the bottom line. “Many companies do not have a lot of experience in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions so they may view going green to be a daunting, costly endeavor,” said Scott Johnson, Vice President of Environmental and Safety Actions at SC Johnson. “We knew it was the right thing to do for our business and the environment.”
In order to tally up its emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG), the company used the GHG Protocol – an emissions-accounting methodology developed by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. “As a result of taking inventory of our energy use in 2002, SC Johnson has identified new opportunities,” said Johnson. “At our Waxdale plant in Racine, Wisconsin, for instance, we will be generating electricity and steam from landfill gas, which we expect will save the company $2.4 million in annual energy costs while cutting GHG emissions from the plant in half.”
The company cut GHG emissions globally by more than 7 percent during its first year of reductions, outpacing expectations. By powering factories with wind turbines and other renewable energy sources, SC Johnson plans to reduce emissions an additional 16 percent by 2005.
SC Johnson is not alone in working to save the environment while saving money. A growing number of manufacturing companies, such as DuPont, GM, and BP, are now tracking their greenhouse-gas emissions with the goal of curbing pollution and improving efficiency. Several companies aiming to reduce their emissions have earned 40 to 50 percent returns on energy-saving investments, according to the Center for Energy and Climate Solutions.
While the GHG Protocol provides a roadmap for corporations in the industrial sector to reduce emissions, WRI has now developed a new guide for office-based operations, “Working 9 to 5 on Climate Change.” The guide, based on WRI’s experiences in pursuing its commitment to reduce emissions in its Washington, DC office to net zero, outlines the steps organizations can take to reduce emissions and save energy in their offices.
The industrial sector produces the largest share of greenhouse-gas emissions in many countries, including the United States. Still, the commercial sector, including office buildings, is responsible for a significant share of pollution. In the United States these buildings account for 19 percent of commercial energy use – 70 percent of that being for electricity.
A number of companies are already taking the lead toward greener buildings. The new 48-story Condé Nast building in New York’s Times Square, for instance, saves $500,000 in energy costs each year thanks to energy efficient technologies like compact fluorescent lighting, clean-burning furnaces, roof-top solar cells, and super-insulated windows. The energy savings will pay off the cost of the building’s efficiency measures in five years.
In 1997, Kinko’s began outfitting new stores with energy-efficient lighting, and retrofitted more than 1,000 existing stores. The company, a member of WRI’s Green Power Market Development Group, also buys almost 8 million kilowatt hours a year of green power generated by renewable sources of energy, like wind and solar. “As a result of our physical footprint and the nature of our business, Kinko’s has the potential to leave a substantial impact on the environment,” said Gary Kusin, Kinko’s president and CEO, at the June, 2002 Mid-Atlantic Green Power Workshop. “That means we must do more than our share of the work to leave the world in a better place than when we found it.”
In 1999, WRI committed to reducing emissions from its new Washington, DC office to “net zero.” Through a series of energy conservation measures, the environmental research organization was able to reduce emissions by more than 11 percent by using energy efficient lighting, heating, and air conditioning.
In addition, WRI bought emissions credits – paying for a school in Portland, Oregon to upgrade its aging heating system – to “offset” 2000 emissions. The organization’s offset purchase helped the school replace its oil-fired boiler with a more efficient natural gas system. (WRI Features, 712 words)
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Curtis Runyan (features@wri.org) is the managing editor of WRI Features, a monthly international news features service on environment and development issues.
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A Fledgling Local Movement to Manage the "Mother of Waters"
by Curtis Runyan
(Washington, DC, April 2003) The Mekong River system, which runs 4,800 kilometers through China, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, and Vietnam, is one of the most complex in the world – both ecologically and politically.
International threats to the river – from dam-building to extensive dredging – are pushing a number of the region’s governments, which are not particularly well known for their environmental planning, to take steps to better manage the river as it passes through their countries. The Vietnamese government, for instance, recently passed legislation to begin regulating demands on the Mekong and to address issues of pollution.
“In Vietnam, we did not have any intention of looking at water law, but when the Mekong problems started to happen, we had to come up with some solutions,” said Do Hong Phan, a former Vietnamese government hydrologist who is now the director of the Centre for Resources Development and Environment in Vietnam.
In the past few years fish harvests have begun to decline. A number of species, including the Mekong’s giant catfish, are now close to extinction. And management of dwindling resources is increasingly problematic. In Cambodia, for instance, commercial fishermen have been unable to meet their fish-catch quotas and have turned their anger on local fishers – shooting them, in one case.
“Often governments think that they can solve these environmental problems by national fiat,” said Mairi Dupar, a Southeast Asia expert at the World Resources Institute (WRI). “But the solutions more often lie in getting local leaders and affected parties to the table – there is a crucial link between better governance and better environmental management.” WRI has been working with Phan and a number of other civil society leaders in the region to increase local participation in government decisions.
Each year during the monsoon rains, the Mekong backs up into a tributary and over-runs Cambodia’s Tonle Sap lake, the largest in Southeast Asia. For a couple of months each year the lake rises beyond its banks and floods an area 5 to 6 times its dry-season surface area – covering more than 1.25 million hectares.
However, this timeless cycle of ebbs and flows in Southeast Asia’s longest river may soon grind to a halt. The flow of the Mekong – the name translates into “the Mother of Waters” – has been increasingly erratic in the past few years, in large part due to conflicting national agendas for developing the river’s resources.
China, the world’s most prodigious builder of dams, is now promising to help level out the flow of the river, reduce flooding, and supply hydroelectric power to the region by building eight large hydroelectric dams near the headwaters of the river. Together with Burma, and Laos, the country has also embarked on a program of blasting rapids and shoals to make the river more navigable for commercial ships. Thailand had agreed to the plan as well, but recently put its support on hold.
But these projects have raised considerable alarm from the river’s downstream neighbors. Officials from countries in the lower Mekong basin are concerned that re-engineering the river’s ecology will disrupt the livelihoods of millions of farmers and fishers along the river. Three-quarters of the population of the lower Mekong basin depend on the river for their livelihoods. And demands upon the river are expected to increase significantly in the next two decades, as the basin’s population is expected to increase from 60 million today to 100 million by 2025.
In February, Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen publicly raised concerns that channelizing the river and erecting dams could dry up the Tonle Sap and further threaten fish stocks. The lake provides crucial spawning grounds for an estimated 1,700 different fish species that populate the Mekong.
“Believe me, the drying up of Tonle Sap will not just affect Cambodia but the entire region,” Sen said in an interview with reporters. “The change in the level of water flow is an important factor.” In Cambodia up to 70 percent of the country’s protein intake comes from fish caught in the Tonle Sap.
In response to environmental pressures – and at the behest of the World Bank and other development organizations – Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos formed the Mekong River Commission (MRC) in 1995. The commission’s aim is to coordinate decisions in each country that affect the river, and to promote more sustainable uses of water resources.
But the MRC, driven by outside actors and international agencies, operates largely on the regional level. “For real change to occur these countries need to have the change come from within,” said Dupar.
“Things like water management are new here,” said Phan. “Until 1997 the government only focused on building water projects and simply using water, now people are beginning to talk about things like integrated-water management … and local input into environmental protection.” (WRI Features, 827 words)
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Curtis Runyan (features@wri.org) is the managing editor of WRI Features, a monthly international news features service on environment and development issues.
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Commentary: Global Warming's Human Fingerprint
by Dr. John H. Gibbons and Dr. Kenton Miller
If we needed another smoking gun to tie the human hand to climate change, new research released earlier this year is it. Two studies published by Nature — each a “meta-analysis” of hundreds of scientific reports cumulatively tracking thousands of species — conclude with confidence factors reaching 95 percent that significant impacts of global warming are already discernible in animal and plant populations.
This is the latest in a long line of scientific reports that have come out in the last five years linking the impact of climate change on the ecosystems that support life on earth. Climate scientists keep finding more and more human “fingerprints” on ecological disruptions caused by global climate shifts. In the United States, however, powerful special interests continue to pressure the Bush administration to question climate science and turn its back on other nations that are taking action to limit emissions that contribute to climate change.
These latest studies find that warming temperatures around the world have pushed plants and animals toward formerly cooler climes. On average, species ranges have shifted 4 miles per decade toward higher latitudes and several feet per decade upward in elevation. Mexico’s endangered checkerspot butterfly, for example, has moved 60 miles north into California, but its migration to escape hotter temperatures has been halted by urban sprawl around San Diego.
While the warmer weather may have accelerated the growth of some species, it has harmed many others, especially in Arctic regions. Rising temperatures have stunted the growth of white spruce trees in Alaska, and they are threatening the future of polar bears by melting the ice fields where the bears hunt for seals. In Costa Rica climate shifts have driven the golden toad into extinction by drying out its habitat – the tropical montane cloud forests.
The two reports document the earlier onset of spring by an average of 2.3 days per decade. The swallows of Capistrano now return to their nests eight days earlier than they did a decade ago. Marmots in Colorado end their hibernation three weeks earlier than they did in 1976. The cherry blossoms in Washington, DC show up a week earlier than in 1970.
These new pressures could tear ecosystems apart, warn the scientists. If birds migrate earlier, for instance, insect populations, free of a major predator, could grow unchecked.
Ominously, these changes have been sparked by a relatively small average warming of just 1 degree F. If governments—particularly the United States—do not act to curb emissions of greenhouse gases, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that global average temperatures will increase by 2.5 to 10 degrees F. If that happens, scientists warn that we can anticipate major ecological disruptions—storm surges, increased flooding, droughts, and mass extinctions.
It took years of study and analyses before scientists concluded that there was adequate proof that global warming is underway, and that it is caused, at least in part, by human action. Two years ago the IPCC concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on global climate.”
In fact, 2002 was the second hottest year in the last century, and an analysis of satellite imagery from September revealed that the Arctic ice cap had melted to its smallest size since measurements were first recorded 25 years ago. At this rate, scientists estimate that the Arctic could be entirely free of ice by 2050. Glaciers around the world are retreating much more quickly than anticipated, and their melting could raise sea levels by as much as 1.5 feet by 2100—far outpacing earlier UN estimates of only 2 to 4 inches.
But the latest studies take the evidence an important step further: not only is the warming occurring faster than expected, it is having an impact on the trees, birds, and butterflies in our own backyards much sooner than anticipated. Nature is already responding as global warming accelerates at unprecedented rates — and we won’t know until it’s too late which species will be able to adapt, and which will be devastated.
The changes we are now seeing are only a precursor of major disruptions that could be caused by unchecked climate change. Every year that passes without strong action to slow the pace of warming locks more ecological changes into place.
The key strategy is to curb our addiction to fossil fuels. If emissions of greenhouses gases that cause global warming were stabilized at today’s levels, the concentration of carbon dioxide would almost double by 2100. If no policy action is taken to control emissions, CO2 concentrations will rise to a level not known on Earth since the age of the dinosaurs. (WRI Features, 823 words)
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Dr. John H. Gibbons, former Science Advisor to President Bill Clinton, is a WRI board member. Dr. Kenton Miller, former director-general of the World Conservation Union, is WRI’s Vice President for Conservation and Development.
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