Mexican Air Pollution Program Evaluated in Harvard Report
At the request of the Mexican government, Harvard researchers have evaluated a popular voluntary program to reduce pollution in Mexico in an effort to bolster support for the program.
The Mexican government started Programa Nacional de Auditoria Ambiental (Voluntary Audit Program), also known as Industria Limpia, in 1992, the same year that the United Nations described Mexico City's air as the most polluted in the world. The city had become notorious for smog alerts, and ozone levels were three times higher than the maximum considered safe by international health organizations nearly a dozen times in 1992.
The Voluntary Audit Program's intent was to improve environmental, health, and safety performance at high-risk plants such as petrochemical facilities without penalizing the companies so harshly they could never afford to make improvements. Since its inception, the program has been extended to include all industries but remains focused on large companies. Currently, there are more than 700 businesses in the program.
Because the program is voluntary, some Mexican officials feared it might get ignored or, worse, shut down if a new administration won power in the late summer of 2000.
So the Mexican equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency, PROFEPA, asked faculty from HSPH and the Kennedy School of Government to independently evaluate the program in Mexico, characterizing how the work is perceived within Mexico. Robert Pojasek, adjunct lecturer in the Department of Environmental Health, directed the study. John Spengler, Akira Yamaguchi Professor of Environmental Health and Human Habitation in the Department of Environmental Health also worked on the evaluation, as did graduate students Kumkum Dilwali and Paulina Serrano.
If a company participates in the Voluntary Audit Program, it invites PROFEPA inspectors and an independent auditor to seek out any environmental compliance violations at its facilities.
"Mexico has good environmental laws, but they may not be as enforced as they are here," said Pojasek. "So in this program the companies turn themselves in and tell everything that's wrong at their facilities."
What would make companies so eager to divulge their infractions? Once in the program, they have several years to comply with pollution laws during which time they cannot be penalized or inspected again unless there has been an accident at the site or a public complaint against the company.
The program is more than a tool by which companies comply with laws, said Pojasek. The scope of the audit includes reducing risks at facilities, which increases the overall safety at a site. That system differs from the US, where two departments, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, address safety and environmental issues, respectively.
"The Mexicans reduce risk, increase health and safety, and come into compliance all at the same time," said Pojasek. "That's beyond what their counterparts do in the US and Canada."
Once contracted in July 2000, the Harvard team had less than five months to produce the report before the new government took office (Vincente Fox officially became president on December 1). A key part of their research was conducting 14 focus group discussions with various stakeholders, such as industry representatives, participants and non-participants in the program, regulatory agencies, non-government organizations, and auditors.
Overall, many of the participants and even some of the non-participants felt that the program was a good idea and should be continued. They acknowledged the temporary protection against penalty allowed companies to comply with laws while installing measures to prevent foreseeable damage to the environment.
The preventive measures also help keep the Mexican companies on par with their wealthier NAFTA partners, the US and Canada, and fulfills Mexico's environmental responsibilities described by the NAFTA agreement.
"Mexicans want to be taken seriously on the world market, and they think that the Americans and Canadians look down on them as inferior environmentally," said Pojasek.
The world market plays a big role in the Voluntary Audit Program. Mexico does not have a stringent enforcement program like the US and Canada, where governments have adopted a "command and control" system in which companies are told what to do and then fined for failure.
Because its legal system is not as well established as those in its northern neighbors, Mexico has created a market-driven system called "compliance through pollution prevention" in which businesses are asked to adhere to laws because it will boost them financially. Sometimes, said Pojasek, this means that Mexican companies go beyond what is required in the US and Canada.
"If the current prosperity in Mexico continues, and the government pulls this off," he said, "they will leapfrog ahead of us environmentally."
The Harvard study found that participants wanted the voluntary audit program to be more open to the public.
The Mexican government took a giant step towards this desire last fall when it created a public document describing the program in detail and requiring that any proposed changes be announced publicly first, as in the US.
The Harvard team is preparing several papers from its study in English and Spanish. The current Mexican government has copies of the Harvard report, and Pojasek predicts the program will continue under the current administration.
For the full project report, visit
http://www.pojasek-associates.com/Harvard/harvard.html.
