Green revolution in the city of palaces

Think of a list of potentially sustainable cities around the world. Would you include the Mexican capital? It might not spring to mind as a prime candidate – but the city’s current administration claims that soon it will be an automatic choice, says Jo Tuckman.

“We are starting the transformation of the city to fit a completely different model.” So says Martha Delgado, waving a copy of the so-called ‘Plan Verde’, which she says will make it all happen.

The Plan is a top priority of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, and Delgado is the Environment Minister in the local administration. Its geographical scope, if not its ambition, is limited; it refers only to the Federal District. Known as DF, this covers the city’s centre and southern semi-rural fringe, and accounts for about 45% of the 20-million population of the Mexico City metropolitan area – but not the remaining areas which spread out into Mexico State and, to a lesser degree, Hidalgo State.

The consequent difficulties in co-ordinating policy are further complicated by the fact that the DF, Mexico State and the Federal Government are run by three different political parties. Nevertheless, a first draft of a metropolis-wide Sustainability Strategy, supported by the UK Government through the UK-Mexico Sustainable Development Dialogue (SDD), is expected before the end of the year.

“We need more than good intentions – we need implementation”

The Green Plan’s go-it-alone ethos does worry activists like Gustavo Alanis, Director of an NGO called the Mexican Centre for Environmental Law. His main fear, however, is that what he calls “a novel and very ambitious plan with excellent intentions” will fall foul of the yawning gulf that traditionally exists in Mexico between political rhetoric and policy action, and between legislation and enforcement. “The problem is that we have a lot of environmental deficits that are extremely difficult and complex to reverse,” says Alanis, “and we need more than good intentions. We need implementation.”

Perhaps the most serious ‘deficit’ dates back to the Spanish colonialists’ decision to drain the lakes on which the city stood, which means that, 500 years on, the DF imports about a third of the water it uses from outside the valley. So the Green Plan’s stated aims of self-sufficiency in water by 2022, and restoring the health of the aquifer [see 'Fresh water  for all'], are among the boldest of its targets.

A healthy aquifer should also help slow the dramatic rate at which the capital is sinking as the spongy lakebed contracts. This reaches 30cm a year in some places. The consequences go beyond structurally unsafe buildings and cracked pipes in an earthquake-prone city; they also put the whole drainage system at risk. The reversal of the slope of a major 19th-century canal, which used to ferry storm run off and sewage out of the city, has put an excessive burden on the deep drainage system built to complement it in the 1960s. Last year experts warned that the danger of a malfunction was real, and that this in turn could leave the city centre under three meters of dirty water for months. Since then, the central deep drainage canal has received its first round of maintenance for 12 years. Construction of a deeper canal is due to start shortly.

The Green Plan’s claim to change Mexico City’s environmental paradigm falls short of reversing the whole drainage model established by the Spanish conquistadors and reinforced by succeeding generations of city authorities. It does, however, promise to start treating the waste water it dumps on its neighbours, much of which irrigates farms growing food consumed in the capital.

The local authority also has ambitions for reducing air pollution. Two decades ago, ozone and particulate levels regularly soared to emergency levels. Today, this is a rare occurrence, although air quality still frequently falls short of acceptable standards, and the city is filled with wheezing children. The gradual improvement is closely tied to a programme that forced all cars over ten years old off the streets for one day a week. The Green Plan extends this to include Saturdays. It will also oblige private schools to provide transport, and promises to retire all old taxis and buses from the roads.

Cleaning the chaos

But the crux of the city government’s anti-pollution drive, along with the core of its claims to be active in tackling climate change and its efforts to get the city moving again, rests on major new investment in public transport.

This is a big challenge. The existing metro built in the 1960s has long been outgrown, leaving a chaotic surface bus network to compete for space with four million cars – an already unsustainable number which has been growing by 400,000 a year.

The Environment Minister insists she can do nothing to stop the explosion in the use of private cars. What the city is doing, however, is to provide better collective alternatives – and hope that frustration of car drivers at going ever slower will persuade Mexico City’s middle classes to overcome their deep reluctance to travelling with the hoi polloi.

The first line of a new Metrobus network, introduced in 2005 to replace 372 regular buses along a main north-south artery, was hailed as a great success abroad, although within the city itself chronic overcrowding puts off many potential users. A massive expansion, with a new network of modern buses with dedicated lanes, is already underway, however [see also 'More energy…less carbon']. A new metro line is planned, too, and an electric tram along a central avenue singled out for regeneration, within a project promoted as ‘the zero emissions corridor’. An important part of the capital’s own Climate Change Action Plan, released in June 2008, this project is one of the initiatives being supported through the SDD.

Most radically for a city that has never seen cycling as an option, the local authority is also preparing a 400km network of cycle lanes, with the help of consultants from bike-friendly Bogota and Copenhagen. A glimpse of what could be is already in evidence in the weekly closure of the central Reforma boulevard, which brings out thousands of cyclists every week for a wheeled equivalent of a traditional paseo.

Water, pollution and transportation aside, the DF’s most immediate challenge to its dreams of sustainability is the question of what to do with the 12,000 tonnes of solid waste it produces every day. Currently this goes to a single overstretched dump, whose imminent closure is at the centre of political wrangling. With no sustainable longer-term solution in place ahead of time, this leaves little choice at first than to send the waste to several privately owned dumps in Mexico State – which are also beginning to fill up. But the Green Plan promises to build the first of several recycling centres that will harness the energy potential of the waste. At the same time, it is set to launch a major campaign promoting rubbish reduction and separation. Until now, Mexico City has relied on pepenadores rooting through rubbish to collect recyclable bottles in return for cash. PET plastic is then recycled at the world’s largest plant of its kind, just 40 miles from the capital, which is run by a conglomerate of drinks companies including Coca-Cola.

But there isn’t much of a culture of recycling among Mexico’s middle classes. Precedent does not bode well. Four years after legislation was introduced obliging Mexico City residents to separate their organic waste, only about 3% of households comply with the law.

Not that such challenges deter Delgado from promising a sustainable future. “The people who live in Mexico City have witnessed the deterioration of the urban environment and they are now worried about it,” she says. “What we have to do now, is to move from this new consciousness to action.”

27 February 2009

Jo Tuckman