The Champions and Laggards in the Latin American Battle Against Climate Change: Part II

In part one of this article, there was an exploration of the Latin American countries that have been succeeding in mitigating the impacts of climate change and what policies they have implemented to being proactive in the fight against this challenge. In the second part, the article will evaluate the countries in the region that have been failing at taking effective climate action. 

Despite the sound successes of Chile and Costa Rica, other countries in the region have demonstrated to be laggards in the fight against climate change. For instance, Mexico’s CAT scores are considered insufficient, which means that the country's emissions are leading to an increase in the planet's temperature by over 3 degrees celsius. In Mexico, the Inter-Ministerial Climate Change Commission (CICC, Comisión Intersectorial de Cambio Climático) has not taken any initiative that would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions or achieve any of the goals of the Paris Agreements. The commission only reaffirms the five-year-old goals of contracting greenhouse gas emissions by 22% and reducing black carbon usage by 51%. The lack of ambition in the new NDC signals that Mexico is retreating from the contaminant-free economy—an economy that deprives itself of using toxics and biological waste in its operations and outputs—that the country engaged in during the presidency of Peña Nieto. However, since the triumph of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexican leadership on clean energy has faded away. In his short time as president, he has slashed the budget dedicated to climate action, put an end to a public Climate Change Fund and repeatedly pushed forward policies to bolster the fossil fuel sector at the expense of renewable energy. However, these poorly directed policies lack the ambition to better the environment operating in opposition to Mexico’s best interest.  For instance, the implementation of NDC would improve livelihoods, food security, public health, water resources, employment, and energy security in the country. The cost of climate action to the nation is evident; doing something outweighs the cost. However, López Obrador seems to fuel the population with the idea that green policies will be too costly for the population when in reality, the agreements would not be beneficial for López Obrador’s pockets and self-enrichment deals.

In the Federative Republic of Brazil, the situation on the environment is not any better than in Mexico. Upon the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has utilized the pandemic as ammunition to deter all environmental programs and climate action initiatives. The updated NDC reduces all ambitions for Brazil’s environmental sustainability; such measures make Brazil one of the largest greenhouse emitters that have reduced the Paris Agreement’s pledge ambitions. Some of the policies include: increasing the amount of CO2 equivalent allowed by 2030 to 400 million tons compared with the 2015 target; increasing the amount of CO2 equivalent allowed by 2025 to 460 million tons, and allowing Amazonian deforestation, one of the main factors in Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions. Brazil’s new NDC leads the country to an environmental depletion that can contribute to the failure of the Paris Agreements to reduce global temperatures by 2 degrees celsius by 2030. Bolsonaro, just like López Obrador, is thinking about what is benefiting their economic prosperity in the short term while disregarding the challenges that climate change is posing for their countries, the region, and the world. 

In summary, it is crucial to denote that the two countries failing spectacularly to meet their Paris Agreement pledges are: 1) the largest economies in Latin America, and 2) both countries have a populist president in power. Climate change is not a challenge that affects a specific group of people; it is an issue that compromises the well-being of the whole world. Pointing fingers at whoever is responsible for the environmental crisis that the world is going through is suboptimal. As with global financial and economic crises, it is imperative to look at collective guilt to understand where this climate catastrophe comes from, but most importantly, policymakers ought to use collective responses to mitigate the damages that all of us have inflicted upon the environment. A giant South American economy like Chile has managed to accomplish significant progress in climate action; the problem is not that the people will care more for money than the environment. Moreover, one of the smallest countries in the region, Costa Rica, has managed to be the leader in environmental action in Latin America; thus, size and funding are not the issues either. The key to achieving these goals is political will; empowering the voters and the citizens to advocate for the protection of their environment through political and non-political actions, something Bolsonaro and López Obrador lack due to their personal agendas and line of thought. Latin Americans ought to demand their leaders get on board with the climate agenda before we reach a point of no return.