Mexico’s likely next President, an environmental scientist, is quiet on climate

THE LÓPEZ home kept f illing with seawater as the Gulf of Mexico rose and winter storms got worse. Cristina López and her family decided to leave after one bad storm in November, knowing the ocean would eventually devour their home in the fishing town of El Bosque.

“There was nowhere else to go,” said López, who now lives about a 20- minute drive away.

Driven by climate change, sea- level rise and increasingly ferocious storms are eroding thousands of miles of Mexico’s coastline facing both the Gulf and the Pacific Ocean. Around this country of nearly 130 million, drought is draining reservoirs dry and creating severe water shortages. Deadly heat is straining people and crops. Aging infrastructure is struggling to keep up.

But don’t expect the leading presidential candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, an environmental scientist and a co- author of the 20 07 Nobel Prize- winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, to make climate a central part of her campaign ahead of the June 2 election.

Sheinbaum is often seen as the mentee of López Obrador, who is restricted by law to one term. As president, he has pumped billions of dollars into Mexico’s indebted state oil company and has been pushing an overhaul of the country’s energy sector that has boosted fossil fuel production and stymied investment in renewable energy projects. That has resulted in Sheinbaum, who until last June was Mexico City’s mayor, having largely gone quiet on global warming in Mexico, the world’s 11th- largest oil producer.

At the heart of her silence appears to be the conundrum facing many leaders in the face of climate change: should they sacrifice immediate political and economic needs to grapple with the longer- term changes necessary for human survival?

Sheinbaum has told AP that she believes in science, technology and renewable energy but also has said that if she wins she would continue increasing power generation by state- owned companies, which often run power plants with oil and coal.

Her main opponent, Xóchitl Gálvez, a former opposition senator, has said she would promote private investment in the energy sector, if elected. The businesswoman has promised to permanently close refineries in Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas states within the first six months of her presidency, and has proposed transforming the country’s staterun oil and gas company into one that could also produce electricity using renewable sources such as geothermal energy.

Whoever wins will be the first female president of Mexico.

As the election approaches, a worsening water crisis is making it harder for Sheinbaum and her main opponent to ignore Mexico’s climate threats.

As for water, Sheinbaum has repeatedly said that Mexico needs a 30- year plan, an idea she has reiterated on the campaign trail. She recently laid out a plan in which she said her administration would prioritize better measuring water use in Mexico across sectors, especially agriculture, which uses the vast majority of the country’s water. But the plan was light on details about how her government would do so.

AP ( Clockwise from left) Cracked banks of Miguel Aleman dam in Valle de Bravo; A home destroyed by sea- level rise in Mexico’ Tabasco state; Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum in an election campaign.