Climate change has never been more obvious in Mexico. A brutal heat wave over the past several weeks killed dozens of people. Howler monkeys fell out of trees, dead from heatstroke. Nearly two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought; Mexico City might be weeks away from running out of water. In a fishing village called El Bosque, rising sea levels have forced residents to abandon their homes. Last fall, when the country’s strongest-ever hurricane hit Acapulco, it caused billions of dollars of damages.
Mexico’s newly elected president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is very aware of both the issue and how much needs to happen to address it: She’s a politician who also happens to be a climate scientist.
Her unusual background is “very significant, because she knows how the international [climate] agenda was built up,” says José Luis Samaniego, executive director of the environmental nonprofit WRI Mexico. “She is an expert on energy-related climate change issues, so she understands the implications. She understands the level of the challenge.”
Sheinbaum, who until last year was the mayor of Mexico City, has a PhD in energy engineering, and completed her work for it at California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She contributed to reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which won a Nobel Prize in 2007 (along with Al Gore) for its work to increase understanding of the climate crisis. As mayor, she pushed for more rooftop solar in Mexico City and better bike and public transit infrastructure. As president, she plans to grow renewable energy. That includes tapping into Mexico’s massive supply of geothermal power to make green hydrogen.
Like most countries, Mexico isn’t moving quickly enough to cut emissions. Climate Action Tracker, a project that studies national climate action, gives the country’s policies a “critically insufficient” rating. (If every country was moving that slowly, the world would be on track for a catastrophic 4 degrees of global warming.) It hasn’t set a target to reach net zero emissions. Last year, the country’s electricity generation from fossil fuels hit a record high. That’s in part because ongoing drought means that the country’s hydropower production steeply dropped. But Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also invested heavily in fossil fuels despite the country’s huge potential for other renewable energy, including solar power.
“The Mexican population is already suffering from extreme weather events and is vulnerable to continue unless policies and actions to massively shift away from fossil fuels in a just and equitable transition are prioritized,” Maria Jose de Villafranca Casas, Mexico analyst for the New Climate Institute, one of the nonprofits behind the Climate Action Tracker, said in a statement over email. “Emissions projections under current policies are expected to continue rising toward 2030 and beyond unless existing policies are enforced and new ones are introduced.”
It’s not clear yet how quickly Sheinbaum will act. As a mentee of the former president, she defended his fossil fuel investments. She’s said that she aims to get Mexico to 50% zero-carbon electricity by 2030. That’s a big jump, but some scientists calculate that the country would need to get to 86% renewables by 2030 to be compatible with keeping global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, the goal of the Paris climate agreement.
Still, WRI’s Samaniego argues that she will move much faster than López Obrador. “There’s a widespread belief, without much substance, that Claudia would be just a continuation of the past administration, but I think she has her own legs,” he says. “She has her own mind and she has her own strong convictions. And that will radically speed up the attention that we pay to the environment and renewables in Mexico.”
A Berkeley scientist who worked with her at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Ashok Gadgil, agrees. “She is smart and strategic,” Gadgil says. “She deeply understands the science and engineering, and also the politics, of how things work and how things get done. I have high confidence that she is deeply committed to do the right thing for climate change and for Mexico, and also skilled at figuring out what is realistically possible, and how quickly.”
That’s good not just for Mexico, of course, but the whole world. In 2022, the country was the ninth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.