Utoo Radio with Other News Sourced - June 6 2024 - Climate change is a pressing issue in Mexico, with a brutal heat wave killing dozens of people and Howler monkeys dying from heatstroke.

Nearly two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought, and Mexico City might be weeks away from running out of water. Rising sea levels have forced residents to abandon their homes in El Bosque, a fishing village. Last fall, the strongest-ever hurricane hit Acapulco, causing billions of dollars of damages.

Mexico's newly elected president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is an expert on energy-related climate change issues and is aware of the need to address it.

Sheinbaum, who previously 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 for its work to increase understanding of the climate crisis. As president, she plans to grow renewable energy, including tapping into Mexico's massive supply of geothermal power to make green hydrogen.

Climate Action Tracker, a project that studies national climate action, gives the country's policies a "critically insufficient" rating.

The country hasn't set a target to reach net zero emissions, and emissions projections under current policies are expected to continue rising toward 2030 and beyond unless existing policies are enforced and new ones are introduced.

Sheinbaum's goal is to get Mexico to 50% zero-carbon electricity by 2030, but some scientists estimate 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.