The Mexican Congress this month approved climate-change legislation intended to lock future governments into low-carbon growth policies and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 50% below 2000 levels by 2050. The bill, expected to be signed into law by President Felipe Calderón before he leaves office at year’s end, makes Mexico the only country in the world besides the United Kingdom to legislate economy-wide greenhouse-gas targets and strategies beyond 2020. Though Mexico is in the thick of the campaign leading up to its July 1 general elections, the heightened political attention helped, rather than hurt, the bill. “The political cost of not approving the law was too high,” says Astrid Puentes Riaño of the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA), a regional nonprofit... [Log in to read more]
