Mexico Slated To Be First Nation To Have Urban Air Quality and UV Data Online

Due to the efforts of a remarkable Mexico City-based NGO, Sistema Informacion Ambiental (SIMA), Mexico within a few months seems likely to be the first nation to have air quality and UV data from each of its monitors in urban areas available online.  SIMA has been providing such data online for the past seven years for the Mexico City metropolitan area. Its user-friendly form has generated a large volume of site visitors and won the organization's Director, Luis Roberto Acosta, widespread recognition. In September 2000 he won Mexico's most prestigious environmental award, The Aleman Prize and in an October 15, 2001 special issue of Time Latin America was featured as one of 27 young Mexican Leaders of the New Millennium.

Acosta and his colleague, Luis Manuel Guerra, President of Instituto Autonomo de Investigaciones Ecologicas (INAINE) from which SIMA was born, have made remarkable progress on very little external funding and often with resistance from governmental authorities who have until recently shied away from acknowledging Mexico's air pollution crisis. Guerra, a Board member of the Climate Institute for the past decade, spearheaded public awareness efforts in Mexico City that caused this city to adopt the most stringent air pollution control measures of any city in the developing world. In the late 1980s Guerra persuaded two of Mexico City's leading radio stations to finance the cost of a van that went about neighborhoods of Mexico City taking air and water pollution samples. Guerra announced these results in calls to the stations which ran them as many as ten times daily. Although some sweeping measures such as Hoy No Circula - restricts most cars from driving one day a week - resulted and made a dent in emissions, the NGO efforts were hardly welcome from governmental authorities at the national or the Mexico City level until the accession of the Fox administration. Having won the Presidency in coalition with the Greens, Fox, whose core support came from his center-right PAN party, committed himself both to strong environmental enforcement by appointing an aggressive environmental secretary, Victor Lichtinger, and to overall governmental transparency. Fox's greatest political success in the face of an opposition dominated Congress has been the passage of a strong Freedom of Information Act. In this environment Acosta and Guerra were able to win the support of the Fox Administration for the expansion of the online coverage of SIMA's site past Mexico City to encompass urban monitors throughout Mexico.       

With funds from the Mexican environment agency, SEMARNAT, and from Daimler Chrysler which has been at the forefront of fuel cell and alternative vehicle applications in Mexico City, SIMA expects soon to add air quality data from Toluca, Puebla and Guadalajara to the site. It is seeking to complete a national urban air quality and UV online system by raising funds to place data for Monterrey online together with that for three border metropolitan areas - Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, Tijuana and metropolitan San Diego, and Callexico and Mexicali. When this is complete Mexico will be the first nation to have its urban air quality data available, almost in real time, online. Individual Mexicans will be able to go online to find carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, particulate and ground level ozone air quality measurements from monitors in their neighborhoods together with explanations of how these compare with health standards. This data is now available in both Spanish and English. SIMA plans to broaden the language coverage to Portuguese and French as well as it seeks to extend this system throughout the Western Hemisphere.

In this effort SIMA is partnering with the Climate Institute which is preparing summaries of studies of climate change impacts in Mexico for placement on the websites of both organizations. Ultimately, visitors to either site will be able to access data on air quality and, where available, UV radiation and climate change impacts, together with information on steps they can take to lighten their personal footprint on the environment.

SIMA's Director, Luis Roberto Acosta, is serving also as Director of Latin American Regional Affairs for the Climate Institute and is championing the idea of coordinated strategies for climate and air quality protection in other Latin American megacities. Among the cities SIMA and the Climate Institute are seeking to involve in both the Hemispheric Environmental Information System and in implementing coordinated strategies are Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Santiago, Chile, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Lima, Peru, Quito, Ecuador and San Jose, Costa Rica as well as many cities in the US and Canada.

Ultimately the Mexican experiment could be one of the best examples of South to North environmental transfer. By using the Internet to provide citizens of Mexico hour-by-hour feedback on air quality levels where they live and work, SIMA may coalesce a force much stronger than commanded by any polluters, no matter what their lobbying prowess. There is already an interesting New Hampshire-Mexico link at work. In September 1999, Ken Colburn, New Hampshire's air quality director, spoke on harmonized strategies for climate and air quality at a conference on the topic convened in Mexico City by the Climate Institute, INAINE, the World Bank, the Government of Mexico City and the US EPA. Colburn's blueprint tailored for New Hampshire was incorporated in part in the long-term Mexico City air quality plan even before New Hampshire enacted a state statute embodying both carbon dioxide and air pollution limits in May 2002. 

By the end of 2004 SIMA and the Climate Institute are seeking to have air quality data from all Western Hemisphere megacities online. If that is achieved, Acosta, Guerra and Fox will have dramatically changed the arena in which environmental policies are shaped not only in Mexico but throughout the world.