The budget for the environment sector next year will be 30% larger, but it does not end up convincing specialists because of a poor distribution in this increase, while the sector has not recovered the levels of resources it had in the previous federal administration.
“It's still worrying and I think it's more worrying now because apparently there's an increase in the budget, but there isn't where it should be,” said José Alberto Lara Pulido, director of the Transdisciplinary University Center for Sustainability (Centrus) of the Ibero-American University.
In real terms, the 40,795 million pesos in the Federal Expenditure Budget (PEF) 2022 in the environmental sector represent an increase of 17.2% compared to the 2021 modified budget of the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat).
For the next year, most of the budget increase, 95.2%, is found in the increase that will be given to the National Water Commission (Conagua), which will go from 24,921 million nominal pesos that were approved this year to 33,916 million pesos in 2022.
The problem, Lara said, is that the authorities' vision of water management in Mexico has been limited to an engineering issue, far from managing the ecosystems that produce water.
“It follows this view that the water problem is a problem of just putting pipes, not of land management or of hydrographic basins,” he explained.
On the other hand, the Center for Economic and Budgetary Research (CIEP) welcomes the fact that resources are being allocated to water infrastructure, since 28% of the population has poor daily access to water.
“By analyzing where this budget is going, we identified that it is aimed at water infrastructure projects, what is this?
wastewater, drainage and sewerage management, in reality the budget (of the branch) is going to water projects,” said Joel Tonatiuh Vázquez
Pérez, coordinator of Energy Transition and Public Finance at the CIEP.
What both experts agree on is that other equally important areas of the environmental sector are being neglected, while the environment has not been a priority for the current administration when it comes to designating a budget.
For example, if analyzed by function, environmental protection will have 18,172 million pesos for next year. This amount represents 0.65% of GDP for 2022 and 0.26% of the total budget proposed in the 2022 PPEF, detailed the CIEP in its report “Implications for the 2022 Economic Package”.
While there will be resources for water infrastructure next year, there are setbacks in other sub-functions such as the protection of biological biodiversity and the landscape, which will fall 1.2%, Vázquez explained from an analysis of the environmental protection function.
Along the same lines, Lara pointed out that if other areas covered by Semarnat are reviewed, there are real decreases in the budget. At the same time, the current administration has prioritized its social program agenda.
Priority elsewhere
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador focuses the resources of these latest programs on people, but without taking into account the environment in which they live, Lara said. “The only thing you're going to have is people giving you money but in an unsustainable way, then where are you going to get the money?” , he questioned.
Some of the current administration's flagship programs could be faced with caring for natural resources. One of them is Sowing Life, which despite being exhibited as an environmental program at COP 26 held this month in Glasgow, United Kingdom, has generated pressure on forests, Lara exemplified.
“In the rules, in theory, you can't access the program if you deforest, you can't cut down forests to access the program, but in practical terms there are no technical or material capabilities for the program's operators to guarantee that there's no deforestation,” Lara said.
[Read this report on deforestation in Sembrando Vida]
As President López Obrador advances his own agenda, the budgetary counterweights to allocate more money to the environmental sector have not existed in the Chamber of Deputies, where the legislators of the official party and their allies account for 55.4%.
Thus, a budget with 1,994 reserves and few adjustments was approved by the Chamber of Deputies on November 15. “Although they don't have a qualified majority, because they have an absolute majority, it's more or less easy for them to approve their budgets,” Lara said.
Comentarios (0)