Focus on Arts and Ecology

The government says fracking can be environmentally friendlier but experts and communities are not so sure. 

By Ana Alicia Osorio, June 2, 2026

Mexico is determined to reduce its dependence on foreign energy. As the administration weighs up possible strategies, president Claudia Sheinbaum has tasked a group of scientists with considering the “sustainable” fracking of unconventional gas.

The proposal has been met with scepticism by experts, activists, and residents of areas that have already been damaged by oil and gas extraction. They question the available evidence and economic viability of fracking methods that minimise environmental damage.

Dialogue Earth consulted Carla Flores Lot, a member of the socio-environmental research group CartoCrítica: “Fracking, without a doubt, compromises the availability of water for human use, fertile soil, the health of communities, and healthy ecosystems, in addition to inducing earthquakes that can compromise the stability of human systems on the surface.”

Fracking involves drilling vertical wells, into which millions of litres of fresh water, sand and chemicals are injected to extract hydrocarbons (usually gas or oil) trapped in the rock. Studies have suggested these chemicals and the associated leakage risks threaten the environment and human health.

The Mexican government’s scientific group will explore alternatives, such as substituting fresh water for other substances. Another avenue being considered is the reuse of “produced water”, the term used for any water that is extracted from the earth alongside hydrocarbons during fracking.

The proposal also suggests using the latest technology to prevent leaks into aquifers. At a press conference in early April, Sheinbaum said fracking can now be achieved using organic chemicals, producing fewer environmental impacts.

“If we are going to exploit unconventional gas, it has to be done in a sustainable way,” Sheinbaum said as she announced the committee of scientists. They will have two months to assess the possibility of green fracking.

Despite these assurances, environmental experts remain concerned.

High cost, scarce water

The notion of sustainable fracking clashes with Mexico’s hydrological and economic realities, according to several experts.

Fracking a “typical” well requires anywhere from 6.8 million to 61 million litres of water, according to the US Geological Survey. And according to the National Council for Humanities, Sciences and Technologies (Conahcyt) of Mexico, 14,500 wells would be required to extract just 10% of the country’s prospective unconventional oil and gas.

The Conahcyt study also asserts that 37% of these unconventional resources are in areas already experiencing severe water shortages.

According to the director of CartoCrítica, Manuel Llano: “When you calculate the number of wells that would have to be drilled in the area and the amount of water they would require, the result is higher than the total amount of water available in those basins and aquifers.”

Methods that reuse water are costlier, says the regional geology and energy systems specialist, Luca Ferrari. This is due to the requisite purification processes.

Studies undertaken in the US state of New Mexico have explored the feasibility of reusing produced water; one suggests its possible use in agriculture. Environmental groups, however, have strongly objected to reusing produced water in the state.

Another study, produced by an Argentine university in 2018, found that the treatment process for recycling produced water would be costly.

“In practice, using recycled water is not very common because it costs a lot, even in the United States, where they’ve been doing this for 20 years and have already tried everything,” explains Ferrari.

In China, companies have begun fracking using carbon dioxide. This method reduces the need for fresh water but it is not yet widely used internationally.

Ferrari and Llano say fracking in Mexico would also require importing equipment and materials from the US, which, combined with the cost of water reuse, would make it economically unfeasible.

Energy sovereignty

In the context of the current Gulf conflict, Sheinbaum’s fracking push has taken on fresh relevance. Aleida Azamar, a professor at the Metropolitan Autonomous University, explains that Mexico is highly dependent on the US for gas exports. It accounts for 75% of Mexican gas consumption, according to the Ministry of Energy (Sener).

The disruption to the Strait of Hormuz, an important thoroughfare for the oil trade, has led to fluctuating prices and highlighted the risks of dependence upon a single supplier.

Mexico consumes around 9.6 billion cubic feet of gas monthly, of which 7.3 billion are imported, according to Sener. The US Energy Information Administration notes a sustained increase in annual imports, rising from 2.2 trillion cubic feet in 2023 to 2.4 trillion in 2025.

With fracking, the state-owned hydrocarbon company Mexican Petroleum (Pemex) aims to achieve a phased increase in gas production, reaching 8.6 billion cubic feet per day by 2035.

Other Latin American countries have increased investments in decarbonisation, often with the financial backing of Chinese companies. Mexico has committed to increasing the renewable energy share of its energy mix from 24% to 38% by 2030, but investment from China has been limited due to pressure from the US, as well as a policy to favour state-owned companies.

“We are betting on building the infrastructure [for fracking] right when the costs of solar, wind and other renewable energy sources are already lower than those of gas,” Azamar says. “It seems to me like an illogical move.”

Resistance to fracking

Since Sheinbaum’s left-wing Morena party came to power in 2018, Mexico’s national policy has opposed fracking. In 2024, then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador sent a bill to congress banning it. The bill failed to advance through the legislative process before he was replaced by Sheinbaum later that year.

At the start of the Morena government, there were already more than 8,400 wells across Mexico, according to the now-defunct National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH).

Sheinbaum herself is a climate change scientist and, as a Morena leader, has also previously opposed fracking.

Her sudden policy shift has therefore sparked opposition from Indigenous communities, such as Reforma Escolín in Veracruz on the east coast. There, residents say fracking dried up springs and streams, forcing them to rely on water trucks and bottled water.

“People are suffering; people are spending money. You have to buy water, when water is a vital liquid for everyone,” says Pastora Garcia, an activist and homemaker. She fears this lack of water access will worsen if fracking expands.

Farmers in Mexico’s Indigenous community of Rafael Rosas, located in an area with high fracking potential, are also wary of Sheinbaum’s shift. Since February, the farmers’ plots have been flooded with crude oil – the result of a Pemex spill. While not related to fracking, this spill is showing the community how extractive industries can affect the land.

Gloria Domínguez is one of the farmers whose land was devastated by this spill: “They are violating our rights, because we too have the right to a dignified life, a healthy life, and a healthy environment.”

Ana Alicia Osorio

The 4,000 km line from Brazil's Atlantic coast to Peru's Pacific is raising both economic expectations and environmental alarm in Latin America. 

By Leslie Moreno Custodio, Jorge C. Carrasco, May 29, 2026

For hundreds of years, global traders have faced a problem: how to transport goods as quickly as possible from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. The Panama Canal, which cuts through the narrow Central American isthmus, was a solution to that problem.

However, as the canal has become more congested and costly, a situation only due to worsen because of climate change, the hunt for other trade routes linking the west of the Americas with the east has intensified.

After more than a decade of false starts, the idea of a “bioceanic” railway connecting Peru’s Pacific coast to Brazil’s Atlantic may finally be gaining traction. The inauguration of the Port of Chancay in late 2024 has injected new momentum into plans for a rail link stretching more than 4,000 km as the crow flies to Ilhéus in Bahia.

The port was developed by Cosco Shipping Ports Chancay Peru, a joint venture between Chinese giant Cosco Shipping Ports and the Peruvian mining company Volcan. It has been presented as a sign of the burgeoning trade relationship between China and Latin America, and has heightened the importance of a reliable trade route.

In February, the Brazilian government cemented the South American Integration Routes project, a network of five transport corridors designed to boost trade with Asia and neighbouring countries. The plan includes multiple route options, including a railway which would link up with the proposed bioceanic train.

Brazil and China had previously signed an agreement through their state-owned infrastructure companies to study the feasibility of the bioceanic railway, which Brazilian officials say could cut shipping times from the country’s coast to Asia by up to 10 days.

The memorandum’s exclusion of Peru, vital to the completion of the project, has raised questions. Responding to concerns, Peruvian Foreign Minister Elmer Schialer stressed that the agreement covered only Brazilian territory and that “access to the Pacific is impossible without Peru’s participation”.

Environmental experts warn the bioceanic corridor would cut through sensitive areas including the Amazon and the Andes. A study by GRAIN, CooperAcción and the Federal Institute of Bahia suggested that dozens of protected areas and Indigenous communities within 40 km of the projected route would be impacted in Peru, alongside more than 100 conservation areas and Indigenous territories in Brazil. Some 320 agrarian reform settlements, given to landless farmers as part of land reforms, could also be affected.

Nevertheless, the idea of a railway to cut across South America has never been closer to reality.

Connecting Brazil’s agricultural heartland

From the Amazon, the train would head out of the forest and through Peru towards Chancay on the coast. As the project is currently being propelled by Brazil and China, any route for the Peruvian section is far from certain.

When Epicentro TV, a Peruvian investigative outlet, requested details on the railway from the transport, culture, and environment ministries last year all three said they had no knowledge of the matter.

Brazil’s own integration routes suggest the railway would enter Peru via Iñapari in Madre de Dios, cut north through the Andes towards Cusco before descending to Chancay.

The route could supplement existing railway work in Peru. In February 2025 a 900 km line linking Chancay to Pucallpa, a city in the Amazon in eastern Peru, was announced.

In March, PowerChina, a Chinese state company, was awarded a USD 420 million contract to build a 120 km railway linking the copper and lithium mining zones of Peru’s central Andes in Junín to Chancay.

The Cooperacción and GRAIN study, which models a likely route, claims that the extension of the bioceanic railway could impact Andean protected areas including the Junín National Reserve – a wetland at an altitude of 4,000 metres and the only habitat of the critically endangered Junín grebe. It could also impact the Machu Picchu Historical Sanctuary, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Cusco that draws more than one million visitors a year, the study says.

While the project has not been approved by Peru, Schialer, the foreign minister, has said it would come with “formidable” environmental challenges, while other officials have said it would require thorough evaluation.

Chancay itself is already Peru’s main gateway to China, its largest trading partner. In its first year of operation, the port handled 67.9% of Peru’s agricultural exports to China. If the plans for a railway linking it to the Atlantic come to fruition, the port will become ever more central to this burgeoning trade relationship.

But some activists fear further development could lead to a repetition of the past patterns: infrastructure built, with environmental and community costs left unaddressed.

Leslie Moreno Custodio

Leslie Moreno Custodio is a Peruvian environmental journalist.

Jorge C. Carrasco

Jorge C Carrasco is a journalist and writer based in Brazil. His work focuses on the intersection of politics, human rights and the environment. He has contributed to publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, and El País in Latin America.

(Sources: Dialogue Earth)

Apekshita Varshney, founder of the HeatWatch initiative, explains why heat deaths in India are undercounted, who is most at risk, and what the country is still getting wrong. 

By Shalinee Kumari, May 11, 2026

The temperature was 48C and the sun bore down on Apekshita Varshney. Reporting from the city of Akola in western India’s Maharashtra state, the journalist remembers how ill she felt that day eight years ago. What stayed with her was how, despite the searing heat, everything around her was business as usual – farm labourers worked in the fields, vendors sold food on the streets and others went about their daily work routines.

Prolonged physical activity in such conditions, she would later understand, makes heatstroke almost inevitable. A 2024 study across major Indian cities found that a single day of extreme heat was associated with a 12% increase in the daily mortality rate, increasing to 33% for heatwaves lasting five days.

In India, the economic losses caused by heat are well-documented. According to the Lancet Countdown, the country lost an estimated 247 billion labour hours in 2024 due to extreme heat, resulting in USD 194 billion of lost potential income. But heat-related deaths and the impacts of prolonged heat stress aren’t documented as extensively, Varshney found.

Realising that India might be undercounting heat-related deaths, Varshney began compiling numbers based on media reports. In 2022, she founded HeatWatch, an initiative focused on heat awareness, research and policy advocacy.

By conducting studies on vulnerable populations such as waste and garment workers, and collecting data on heatstroke cases, the non-profit helps expand awareness, capacity and accountability to facilitate better decision-making and on-the-ground action. Her work also brings up data points that show the broader, compounding impact heat has on people across the country. “We cannot just be focusing on mortality. We also need to think of morbidity,” Varshney says. “What’s the impact on our people’s cardiovascular health? What’s the impact on our people’s kidney health?”

Dialogue Earth spoke to Varshney about some of the key questions surrounding heat in India, including how the most vulnerable suffer, as well as the long-term impacts of heat stress and what more can be done to mitigate these issues. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Dialogue Earth: India’s official records cannot agree on the number of deaths caused by heat. Why?

Apekshita Varshney: Heat is a slow-onset hazard. It’s not visibly dramatic like storms. We don’t immediately recognise that heat is causing so much damage – not just to people’s health, but also to productivity, to businesses and to the economy.

Because of that, even the idea that heat can kill is still quite contentious. Our healthcare systems are only now getting more equipped to deal with the impacts of extreme heat on the human body, and it’s still an evolving area of research.

There is a lot of confusion among medical practitioners, policymakers and bureaucrats about what counts as a heatstroke death. Was it a person with pre-existing conditions whose health was worsened by heat, or was it someone otherwise healthy who was exposed to extreme conditions? That distinction becomes difficult to make.

On the ground, doctors often say they don’t have the resources or time to carry out the detailed examinations or postmortems needed to be certain. In states where heatwaves have been notified – meaning officially recognised – as a disaster, there is also the question of compensation for families, which adds another layer of complexity. All of this has made heatstroke into a political challenge.

At the same time, what is undeniably true is that people are dying because of heat.

There is increasing evidence of this and more questions being raised. Researchers and public health experts have also pointed out that the actual number of heatstroke deaths is likely far higher than what is officially reported. So what we really need is a much more honest and transparent approach to understanding heat-related deaths.

Different government agencies are collecting data in different ways, with no standardised system. There are guidelines, but they are not consistently implemented. There are also platforms like the Integrated Health Information Platform, where data is supposed to be uploaded. But these are not publicly accessible, so people outside the system cannot verify or understand what is being reported.

There is also a tendency to downplay the crisis, with people often saying India has always been a hot country. This makes it harder to recognise the scale and severity of what is changing.

Since you established HeatWatch, have you come across a story of a person or community that shocked you about heat in India?

There are many examples that show how gigantic the problem is. One that has really stayed with me is a Mongabay story about 54-year-old security guard Devi Prasad Ahirwar. He belongs to a marginal caste and suffered a serious heatstroke at work just outside Delhi. After spending six days on a ventilator, unconscious, he survived but was left bedridden. With no income or employer support, Ahirwar and his family were pushed into financial distress.

That story highlights simple but important truths: we want people to survive, and we want our healthcare systems equipped to be able to immediately provide lifesaving relief to heatstroke victims. But we are not really thinking about what kind of recovery is possible afterward. The impact of severe heat on the body is tremendous.

Would you say caste, class and labour conditions are still underplayed in coverage?

There has definitely been an increase in coverage in the last couple of years, especially on the impact of heat on vulnerable communities, and that is important to acknowledge. But we still have a long way to go.

There is not enough research or reporting on how caste and occupation are linked to heat exposure. We are also not making the argument strongly enough that these communities, which contribute very little to carbon emissions, are the ones facing the most severe impacts of climate change. Similarly, when it comes to gender, we tend to generalise women as a single group – but there are further vulnerabilities within that category. For example, Dalit women are far more impacted than dominant-caste women.

On labour, the conversation has largely moved towards heat action plans, but these plans do not address working conditions in a meaningful way. They do not talk about enforceable protections for outdoor workers or compensation for lost wages. We are still at the stage of fighting for basic amenities like water, sanitation and shade. The conversation needs to move further to include healthcare, compensation and broader protections.

One extremely important study from IIM Bangalore and others finds that marginalised caste groups experience higher heat exposure because caste and occupation are so closely linked in India. However, we still do not have enough research, or even enough media reporting, on how deeply interconnected these issues are: the impact of heat on manual scavengers, waste workers, sanitation workers, and others who work on the streets; why they are forced into these jobs; and the impact of climate change and extreme heat on communities that have contributed virtually nothing to carbon emissions.

A HeatWatch study found that indoor heat is an everyday reality for garment factory workers. Many reported stagnant air and lack of ventilation at workstations. Can you talk more about the dangers of this type of heat?

Indoor heat is a major issue especially in informal settlements and smaller factories. Many of these spaces are built using materials like tin and asbestos, which trap heat. There is poor ventilation, overcrowding, and multiple people living or working in small spaces, which adds to the heat.

Studies that have measured temperature and humidity in these environments show they can be significantly higher than outside.

In factories, there may be limited cooling – sometimes just an exhaust fan or distant fans – and in some areas, cooling cannot be used because of the nature of the work. All of this means that people indoors can experience conditions as severe as those working directly under the sun.

People cope in small ways: by sitting near doorways to get some airflow, sending children to neighbours who have access to coolers or air conditioning, or continuing to work despite extreme discomfort.

The solutions are complex. They involve using better building materials, improved design, access to credit, and addressing issues like land rights and eviction fears. Without addressing these structural issues, it is difficult to provide meaningful thermal comfort.

Heat stress seems to only increase with every passing year. This year, since March, Maharashtra alone has reportedly recorded 163 heatstroke cases and three suspected deaths, along with more than 400,000 hospital visits linked to heat-related symptoms. If nothing changes, what will Indian summers look like in the next decade?

We are already seeing changes in places that did not experience heatwaves before. Bangalore, for example, has had very intense summers recently.

We are likely to see more heatwave days and more extreme temperatures. Unless we make significant changes to how our cities are designed and managed, they will become increasingly unliveable. Only those who can afford cooling will be able to maintain some level of normalcy.

This also raises larger questions about who has access to cooling and who does not, and whether cooling should be treated as a necessity rather than a privilege available only to those who can afford it.

If you could implement one fix before the next heatwave season in India, what would it be?

There are no easy solutions as this is a complex problem. But one important step would be to notify heatwaves as a national instead of state-specific disaster. That can help unlock financing at a national level, not just for reactive measures when a heatwave strikes, but for actual mitigation efforts. Right now, we tend to respond after the fact, but what is needed is planning and investment before conditions become extreme.

Alongside that, we need large-scale capacity building. This is not just about communities, who are often framed by the nonprofit sector as beneficiaries. What we really need is for bureaucrats and policymakers to be trained and equipped to understand the scale of the problem. They need to be armed with data on what extreme heat and climate change are doing to the country, and knowledge on what solutions are available.

And there are solutions. But unless the people in positions of power understand them and are able to act on them within their own constituencies, it becomes very difficult to implement meaningful change. These are things that should have already been in place, but they need to happen as soon as possible.