Mexico City Is Sinking Fast — and climate change is to blame
Student Author: Eduardo Orbe Martinez, Foothill College, Silicon Valley CA
With a predicted 8.8 million people just within its official city limits alone, Mexico City is undeniably huge — and undeniably built on unstable ground.
It’s a recipe for disaster, social instability — and new waves of climate refugees fleeing Mexico City just to survive.
Built on an ancient lakebed, Mexico City’s most well-known and infamous problem is that the city is literally sinking — with some highly affected areas sinking at a rate of 9 inches per year (Kimmelman).
Subsidence like this happens due to water shortages exasperated by ever increasing droughts — making climate change the final catalyst that ends up sinking the city. And driving outward immigration.
Here’s why: According to one recent New York Times report entitled “Mexico City, Parched and Sinking, Faces a Water Crisis,” even as water shortages increase, “the people of Mexico City keep drilling deeper for more [water], weakening the ancient clay lake beds on which the Aztecs first built much of the city, causing it to crumble even further” (Kimmelman).
And with some areas sinking more than others, there are even sections throughout the mega city where it looks like rippling waves frozen in concrete.
As unfortunate as it is for the building owners witnessing their property turn into real world funhouse mirrors due to uneven ground, these shifts cause havoc to the underlying concrete floor. In turn, these weakened concrete structures transform into deathtraps:
One well-known incident involved a teenager falling into the dark abyss cause by a sinkhole forming right under him (Kimmelman).
Even getting an education can become a risky endeavor — for as the New York Times emphasizes, to date “15 elementary schools have crumbled or caved in” (Kimmelman). According to another recent report by NBC News, watch out for just walking down the street — in case yet another new sinkhole suddenly swallows a stretch of said street. Innocently living your life as a construction worker? Yup, you got it, swallowed up in a sinkhole along with your buddies, according to another horrific headline in the Latin American Herald Tribune. Sinkholes have even gained the ability to fight crime by appearing underneath highways shoddily built due to equally shoddy contracts, concludes Mark Stevenson in The Seattle Times.
Of course lack of water is an even more widespread problem than sinkholes in Mexico City. As the New York Times empahsizes, due to the city’s overdevelopment causing nonporous materials blocking water from seeping and collecting underground, “Mexico City now imports as much as 40 percent of its water from remote sources” (Kimmelman). There just isn’t enough water and as a result there are unfortunate people living in sections of the city where the source of water coming through their pipes is all dried up. Even with the help of importing 40 percent of water into the cities system, “the government acknowledges that nearly 20 percent of Mexico City residents — critics put the number even higher — still can’t count on getting water from their taps each day.”
It gets worse since for some of these people “water comes only once a week, or once every several weeks, and that may mean just an hour of yellow muck dripping from the faucet” (Kimmelman). The number of residents without reliable water to drink, clean, or bathe in has spawned an entire private industry focusing on delivering water to the premise inside a prebuilt or specially built water tank. It costs to be poor since that water doesn’t come cheap — -those that use this service are expected to pay, “costs sometimes exponentially higher than wealthy residents pay in better-served neighborhoods.”
Storm Warning: with climate change bringing ever more drought to Mexico City, the forced heavy reliance on water from outside sources and the cities actions of digging ever deeper for water leaves the city open to a perfect storm. As the city digs deeper and deeper there will come a point where cost and time would be too prohibitive to dig further down. This will leave areas especially vulnerable to droughts since their area’s underground water table is already ridiculously low. With time passing, ever growing sections of the city will have a harder and harder time receiving any water at all.
There may even come a point where a drought will be able to wipe out the city’s entire reservoir. No one knows more about the dire consequences of such an event than Ramón Aguirre Díaz, Director of the Water System of Mexico City — who bluntly stated, ” ‘there is no way we can provide enough trucks of water to deal with that scenario’ ” (Kimmelman).
Make no mistake, those who are reading this and dismissing the dangers of climate change due to Mexico City’s very special geography are simply not seeing the bigger picture. As the global climate catastrophe worsens, every single city will have its own particular strength and weakness in slowing down the impacts of climate change. Droughts along with other natural disasters will “continue to be a major driver of shorter-term displacement and migration,” warns Koko Warner of the UNU Migration Network.
These disenfranchised people with no home would no-doubt look for areas less negatively impacted by climate change — so now a well-off city will be a prime target for even more hungry mouths.
Meanwhile those too poor to move away from Mexico City’s surrounding mountain walls trapping carbon monoxide filled smog will come to represent the entire world’s inability to escape the incoming heat trapped by the Earth’s atmosphere.
Will your city meet the same fate as Mexico City? The same perfect storm? — or will your city face a whole different set of political policy sinkholes?
Works Cited
Davidson, Tamara. “Breathing Mexico City’s Air Is Sometimes as Bad as Smoking Three Cigarettes a Day.” Aztec Reports, 5 Mar. 2019, aztecreports.com/breathing-mexico-citys-air-is-sometimes-as-bad-as-smoking-three-cigarettes-a-day/2482/.
Kimmelman, Michael. “Mexico City, Parched and Sinking, Faces a Water Crisis.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 Feb. 2017, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/02/17/world/americas/mexico-city-sinking.html.
“Massive Sinkhole Opens in Mexico City.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 9 July 2007, www.nbcnews.com/id/19682106/ns/world_news-americas/t/massive-sinkhole-opens-mexico-city/.
“Sinkhole Swallows Construction Workers in Mexico City.” Latin American Herald Tribune — Sinkhole Swallows Construction Workers in Mexico City, www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=334779&CategoryId=14091.
Stevenson, Mark. “Mexican Highway Sinkhole That Killed 2 Exposes Corruption.” The Seattle Times, The Seattle Times Company, 21 July 2017, www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/mexican-highway-sinkhole-that-killed-2-exposes-corruption/.
“UNdata | Record View | City Population by Sex, City and City Type.” United Nations, United Nations, 2017, data.un.org/Data.aspx?q=Mexico City&d=POP&f=tableCode:240;countryCode:484.
Warner, Koko, et al. “In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement.” UNU Migration Network, 21 Dec. 2013, migration.unu.edu/publications/policy-briefs/in-search-of-shelter-mapping-the-effects-of-climate-change-on-human-migration-and-displacement.html.
