President Claudia Sheinbaum's reform of the General Law on Ecological Balance and Environmental Protection (LGEEPA) does not include an extra budget, although it seeks to give more teeth to the Federal Office for Environmental Protection (PROFEPA) and turn it into the Federal Attorney's Office for Environmental Justice.
For this reason, during the first day of public hearings on the reform initiative in the Chamber of Deputies, some voices expressed concern about the lack of resources with which it is intended to implement a new environmental law.
“It must be executable and realistic,” said Ricardo Azael Medina Calvario, president of the College of Biologists of Mexico.
“The secretary also said it: we must ensure a real and sufficient budget for the environmental sector in all three levels of government for the execution of this law,” Medina Calvario added.
“They want to give PROFEPA more teeth, but without the resource we see it as complicated,” he added.
The twelfth transitory article of the draft reform states that “all expenditures generated on the occasion of the entry into force of the decree must be covered by the already authorized budget of the executors of the corresponding expenditure”.
Meanwhile, the budgetary impact opinion of the reform, issued by the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit (SHCP) determined that the initiative does not generate an additional budgetary impact.
Regarding the transformation of PROFEPA to the Federal Attorney for Environmental Justice, the Treasury considered that it does not need more resources because “it is not a transformation or a replacement of the administrative structure, so it will not involve changes in the material and financial resources it has.”
However, the reform provides PROFEPA with a broader framework for action. It gives her the power to assume the status of offended, to represent collective victims and to collaborate directly with the Public Prosecutor's Office in the accusation of environmental crimes. In addition to expanding its research capacity and reinforcing its precautionary measures.
In the Expenditure Budget Draft of the 2027 Federation, PROFEPA is allocated 2.0% of the total budget of the environmental sector, equivalent to approximately 990 million pesos, a real increase of 14% compared to the previous year, according to the Center for Economic and Budgetary Research (CIEP).
At the start of the public hearings, the Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources, Alicia Bárcena Ibarra, indicated that the environment does not have the necessary economic resources it requires. “We know that it's a sector that doesn't have, perhaps, all the resources we require,” he said.
“I hope that the deputies will help us a lot,” Bárcena told a group of deputies in the midst of the analysis of the economic package for the next year, which must be approved by Congress no later than November 15.
Despite this, he assured that the reform strengthens the role of PROFEPA. It has to be the great instrument that helps us to achieve environmental justice,” said Bárcena. “Give it more teeth,” he said.
In this regard, academic Jarumy Méndez, professor at the Universidad Anahuac Oaxaca and Secretary of Environment and Climate Change at Somos México, criticized that the reform “will not have a single additional weight.”
“It creates new obligations without new money and the money that does exist is mislabeled. The government calls the construction of trains climate change. A third of the climate change budget goes to railway infrastructure,” he exemplified.
“This law protects everything, but it doesn't fund anything. What is not budgeted is not protected,” he concluded.
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