Mexico requests funding for Gran Selva Maya conservation, Digi Mart USA News (Mexico): Asking for money is easy. Last week, at a United Nations summit in Armenia, Mexico presented its plan for the Gran Selva Maya, a region it shares with Guatemala and Belize, and sought funds to monitor jaguars and control fires.
The cause is fair, and it is legitimate to ask. But whoever asks for money to protect a territory must first answer an uncomfortable question: what has been done with that territory?
Mexico has more than 200 natural protected areas. According to the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (Conanp), this number grew notably in 2026.
However, major adversities persist amid these achievements; a clear example is the Calica mine in Playa del Carmen. Although the site was closed and decreed a protected area, Mexico prevailed on the main points in the international arbitration brought by the foreign company.
A decree is not care. Conanp estimates it is missing hundreds of millions of dollars a year to look after what it already protects.
According to the institution’s own information, there is one person in the field for each territory almost as large as Mexico City. And four in ten natural areas do not even have the document stating which threats they face and how to address them.
A protected natural area without a plan, staff or money is a line on a map. It can be showcased at a summit, but it cannot be defended in the field.
To measure whether a government is fulfilling its commitments, one should look not at what it promises but at what it itself acknowledges. A few weeks ago, the Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources told lawmakers that the permit to remove jungle for the Tren Maya, the land-use change permit, remains incomplete: less than half has been obtained.
That permit must be secured before a single tree is felled. The train is already operating and the trees have already fallen.
In other words, the procedure is being completed after the works. It is also not advancing: a year earlier, the secretary gave the same figure.
She explained that in several sections it has not been possible to verify who owns the land. Almost three years after its inauguration, the train continues to operate with that matter pending.
There is more. The Federal Attorney General’s Office for Environmental Protection (Profepa) acknowledged before a judge that works on section five damaged cenotes and caves.
Today, according to Semarnat itself, six of the eight affected sites have been cleaned up. Two remain.
And the conditions the works were required to meet, the commitment signed with the environment before construction begins, were classified as confidential. If no one can know what was promised, no one can know whether it was fulfilled.
Environmental impact studies presented when the works are almost finished
What does not appear in the photographs is repeated on a smaller scale. In the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, the Defense Ministry built a hotel with more than one hundred rooms.
According to a journalistic investigation, the environmental impact study was presented when the works were almost finished. And that same reserve, according to an analysis by civil society organizations, would see its conservation budget cut by more than two-thirds.
A large hotel and a reserve with almost nothing: two decisions concerning the same territory.
Calica also leaves an unanswered question. The decree protecting those lands includes, according to reports, a section of the train itself, precisely where damage to the caves was acknowledged.
Who repairs it? Who manages that area?
Closing a mine was the easy part. What follows is the difficult part.
A train is not needed to see the pattern. In Yucatán there are more than 500 pig farms, according to the official diagnosis.
Profepa has conducted some thirty inspections since 2022 and has almost always found the same thing: farms operating without environmental impact permits. In October, community organizations and Greenpeace presented studies, with laboratories at UNAM and Johns Hopkins University, that again found traces of pig feces in wells and cenotes in Maya communities.
In Yucatán there are no surface rivers. The water is underground.
What is discharged above is consumed below.
None of this removes the justification of those asking for help. It removes their credibility.
Donors and communities have the right to ask what happened to the conditions, the permits and the oversight in the jungle where investment has already been made. For that reason, three simple demands are reasonable.
That the environmental conditions of public works be published, section by section, with their compliance status. That no public work begin without a complete environmental permit, hotels included.
And that every dollar arriving from abroad for the southeast come with a means of measuring what is fulfilled within.
Receiving is easy. Giving is the hard part: giving permits before construction, giving information, giving staff, giving sanctions and giving redress.
The jungle does not read decrees. When outside money runs out, who will protect it?
