Mexico City, October 26.- Mexico is heading into the next climate change summit ( COP 26 ) in breach of international treaties it has signed , such as the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which agreed to reduce greenhouse gas ( GHG ) emissions , environmental experts said.
Anaid Velasco, a lawyer at the Mexican Center for Environmental Law ( Cemda ), indicated that human rights treaties are even being violated "because we know that the impacts of climate change—that is, the loss of housing, difficulty in accessing water, disease, and the loss of biodiversity—constitute violations" of individual rights.
In the press videoconference ahead of the Climate Change Summit, Mexico noted that Mexico is among the 15 countries that emit the most greenhouse gases, and according to an analysis by the Climate Action Tracker, the country's climate policy was classified as "highly insufficient" to address the scenario of limiting the average increase in global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Specialist insists that Mexico must reduce its pollutants
For her part, Daniela García Aguirre, a specialist from the Inter-American Association for Environmental Defense ( AIDA ), highlighted the importance of including the reduction of short-lived climate pollutants in countries' climate strategies to achieve this goal.
And while short-lived pollutants, such as methane and black carbon, remain "in the atmosphere for a very short time," reducing their emissions does have short-term repercussions , which would help slow the rate of global warming, he noted.
Instead, he explained, even if the sources of carbon dioxide ( CO2 ) emissions, the main greenhouse gas, are "turned off today," it won't make much difference because it can remain in the atmosphere for centuries . "What we do today with these emissions, we won't see in the next 50 years," he stressed.
García Aguirre explained that if these measures were implemented on a global scale, global methane emissions could be reduced by 40 percent and black carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2030, which would help prevent an additional 0.5 degrees Celsius of global warming by 2050.
The message is that by focusing on short-lived pollutants, “ we mitigate climate change, we improve air quality , and the world needs to know that there are options to do so,” he added.
