North America's environmental policies

As the location of three heavily populated countries with intense industrial and agricultural activity, North America is a significant contributor to such environmental problems as air and water pollution, habitat destruction, and species loss. The environmental management policies of the continent’s three nations thus play an important role in the well-being of ecosystems on a global scale.

Although Canada, the United States, and Mexico are separate countries, the three are involved in many collaborative efforts to protect their shared environment. With the increasing awareness of the fact that the political, economic, and social decisions of all countries have environmental impacts far beyond their own borders, all three of the countries of North America have increased their attention to environmental concerns and are committed to a cooperative approach to addressing environmental problems.

Cooperation between Canada and the United States in regard to environmental issues dates back to 1909, when the two countries signed the Boundary Waters Treaty and established the International Joint Commission to manage the bodies of water shared by the two nations. More than thirty agreements regarding the environment have since been signed by Canada and the United States, including the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (1972), which protects the ecosystem of the Great Lakes basin, and the Air Quality Agreement (1991), which is concerned with the harmful emissions that cause acid rain. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Environment Canada have implemented and oversee a number of agreements dealing with problems of transboundary movement of hazardous substances ranging from toxic chemicals to solid waste.

Just as the United States and Canada’s first cooperative environmental efforts addressed problems along a shared border, so did those of the United States and Mexico. The first agreement between the United States and Mexico concerning the environment was the Mexican Water Treaty of 1944, which concerned the use of the waters of rivers shared by the two nations. In August 1983, the two countries signed the Agreement on Cooperation for the Protection and Improvement of the Environment in the Border Area, known as the La Paz Agreement, which was intended to reduce risks to public health along the border and sought to restore the area to its natural state. In November 1993, Mexico and the United States established the North American Development Bank (NADB) and the Border Environment Cooperation Commission (BECC). BECC works with local communities in areas affecting public health, such as solid waste disposal and the treatment of drinking water, and the NADB finances BECC projects. In 2006 the two organizations were combined into a single entity.

With the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992 (the agreement went into effect in January 1994) by all three nations of North America, concerns arose about the potential impacts of increased industrial and agricultural activity on the environment of Mexico and consequently on North America’s environment. As a result, the three countries also signed the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation, which entered into effect on the same date as NAFTA. Under this agreement, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation was established to ensure that the new trade agreement among Canada and the United States, two highly developed countries, and Mexico, a country still in the process of economic development, would not have harmful impacts on the environment. The commission not only addresses environmental problems but also works to ensure stronger enforcement of existing environmental laws. Many environmental concerns are shared by all three countries, including air and water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, land destruction and deforestation, loss of habitat, and loss of land and marine biodiversity.

Air Pollution and Greenhouse Gas Emissions

With its densely populated metropolitan areas and its intensive manufacturing and agricultural activities, North America has serious problems with air pollution. Among the most significant contributors to air pollution across the continent are emissions from the transportation sector. The large numbers of motor vehicles used daily in the major metropolitan areas throughout North America emit large quantities of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, particulate matter, and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, resulting in ground-level ozone and smog, which are hazardous to human health and to the health of other animals and plant life, including crops and trees. Although primarily produced in metropolitan areas and in areas of heavy industrial production and at power plant locations, ground-level ozone is also a threat to the environment in rural areas, as it is carried into these areas by wind. These emissions, which are primarily greenhouse gases, have also been linked to global warming and climate change.

The petroleum industry and the generation of power by the burning of fossil fuels also contribute heavily to air pollution in North America. Increasing demand for electricity has resulted in increased burning of fossil fuels across the continent. In the late twentieth century, the preference of many North Americans for sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and pickup trucks rather than more fuel-efficient vehicles contributed to increases in the use of fossil fuels. Canada’s development of the oil sands in the Athabasca basin in the province of Alberta, a process that requires extraction by open-pit or strip mining, led to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions in that region. In spite of this increase in the petroleum sector, Canada saw a decrease in its overall greenhouse gas emissions in 2008, owing in large part to a sluggish economy.

In 2008 Mexico experienced a 25-percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions, primarily because of problems of flaring and leaks in the production of natural gas and petroleum. Although the Mexican government attempted to reduce emissions by controlling flaring and leaks in the oil industry and by moving toward more efficient cars and power plants, the nation remained the second-largest producer of greenhouse gasses in Latin America into the 2020s. In 2022, the Mexican government submitted a proposal to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 35 percent by 2023, and to achieve a net-zero deforestation rate by the same year.

With its dependence on motor vehicle transportation and on fossil fuels as the major source of energy generation, the United States emits large amounts of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. While some economic sectors in the United States (particularly those involved with solar energy and electric cars) have done considerable research to find means of reducing emissions, others, such as the coal industry, have been slow to develop and implement measures to protect the environment. The urgency of the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions remains a topic of debate in the United States.

Water Pollution and Loss of Biodiversity

Water pollution is an important concern in North America. Although both the United States and Canada provide their residents, in general, with better water quality than is found in much of the rest of the world, in rural areas throughout the continent, polluted water from contaminated wells and rivers, lack of proper sewage disposal, and improper disposal of waste from animal confinement systems still can be a serious hazard to human health. Agriculture also contributes to water pollution through irrigation runoff from crop fields, which contains residues of pesticides and fertilizers. Polluted water poses a threat to both land and aquatic species. Toxic chemicals in water affect entire ecosystems as they destroy vegetation and poison fish as well as the animals that eat the fish.

Acid rain remains a serious problem for Canada owing to the transboundary movement of pollutants from coal- and oil-fired power plants, motor vehicles, and smelters in the United States. Canada’s soils and lakes lack the alkalinity necessary to neutralize the sulfur, mercury, and other toxic substances present in acid rain, which ruins the soil for crop production, destroys vegetation in the areas affected, and renders lakes and rivers poisonous to fish, other wildlife, and human beings. In addition, acid rain causes stratospheric ozone depletion and makes lakes and rivers more susceptible to ultraviolet radiation.

Land Destruction and Deforestation

Urban sprawl, industrial development, agricultural practices, and other human activities all contribute to land destruction and deforestation. Throughout North America, a long-term trend has been a population shift from rural areas toward the cities, where economic opportunities offer the prospect of a better quality of life. This migration over time has resulted in shifts in land use. As cities expand, land that was prairie, forest, or prime cropland disappears with the building of housing developments, roads, and paved shopping and entertainment centers. Such changes significantly affect the environment through increases in greenhouse gas emissions and the pollution of both water and land as the result of human activities. Further, the loss of natural areas, particularly the loss of forests, contributes to global warming and climate change, because trees are natural cleansers of carbon dioxide from the air.

Although urban sprawl significantly affects the environment as it increases pollutants, agriculture has far greater impacts on the environment. The negative effects are particularly great when land that is not naturally suitable for agriculture is used for that purpose; such land requires intensive irrigation and fertilization to be productive as cropland, and both practices are harmful to the environment. Throughout North America, the overexploitation of land for increased food and biofuel crop production and the overgrazing of grasslands by cattle have caused serious damage to the environment.

The tropical rain forests of south and southeast Mexico have been drastically reduced in area as land has been cleared and converted to pastureland for cattle; this change in land use has resulted in severe soil erosion. In the north and northwestern parts of the country, intensive irrigation has caused not only soil erosion but also desertification, owing to the saline content of the water used.

In the United States, especially in the western states, agriculture uses more water than does any other economic sector. Modern intensive farming methods also cause considerable damage to waterways and to groundwater, contaminating them with pesticides and fertilizers through irrigation runoff. The expansion of farming activities has led to deforestation as woodlands have been cleared and converted to cropland. The major threats to the environment from land use in Canada come from the exploitation of oil sands, which threatens certain forest areas, and from urban expansion in the Great Lakes basin.

Loss of Habitat and Species Endangerment

Throughout North America, the natural habitats of many species have been destroyed as forests, grasslands, and wetlands have been converted to other uses, including industrial development and agriculture. This destruction of habitats has resulted in the endangerment of many species native to the continent, such as the peregrine falcon, the condor, and the wolf.

The activities of North Americans have also endangered marine life. One of the most crucial areas of environmental importance affecting the three North American countries involves the extraction of the oil from deposits found beneath the seas off their shores. The process of drilling for the oil can pollute ocean waters, whether through relatively small leaks or through disastrous spills such as the one that resulted from an explosion on BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. The pollution caused by oil spills endangers fish, shellfish, seabirds, and marine mammals.

Bibliography

Beck, Gregor Gilpin, and Bruce Litteljohn, eds. Voices for the Watershed: Environmental Issues in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Drainage Basin. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2000.

Earle, Sylvia A. The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2009.

Gallagher, Kevin. Free Trade and the Environment: Mexico, NAFTA, and Beyond. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 2009.

Hillstrom, Kevin, and Laurie Collier Hillstrom. North America: A Continental Overview of Environmental Issues. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2003.

Lombard, Emmett. International Management of the Environment: Pollution Control in North America. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999.

López-Hoffman, Laura, et al., eds. Conservation of Shared Environments: Learning from the United States and Mexico. Phoenix: U of Arizona P, 2009.

"Mexico: Climate Change Country Profile." United States Agency for International Development, 29 Nov. 2023, www.usaid.gov/climate/country-profiles/mexico. Accessed 22 July 2024.

"Taking Climate Action." United Nations Environment Programme, 2024, www.unep.org/regions/north-america/regional-initiatives/taking-climate-action. Accessed 22 July 2024.

Temby, Owen, and Peter J. Stoett. Towards Continental Environmental Policy? North American Transnational Networks and Governance. Albany: State U of New York P, 2017.