It also proposes planting some 250,000 trees. To ensure effective water management for Mexico City, the airport master plan proposes creating new permanent water bodies to offset the lakes lost to the airport and cleaning up and restoring nine rivers east of the airport. The new airport will occupy 17 square miles of the 46-square-mile former Lake Texcoco. The smattering of small lakes and reforested land there now catch and store runoff rainwater and prevent dust storms. In 1971, President Luís Echeverría decreed the area a federal reserve, citing the region’s critical ecological role for Mexico City. Reuters/Carlos Jassoīy the mid-20th century, the lakes had been almost entirely drained.

Mexico City’s new international airport doesn’t have to be an expensive boondoggle. Slowly, over centuries, local residents – first the Aztecs, then the Spanish colonizers and then the Mexican government – built cities, irrigation systems and plumbing systems that sucked the region dry. I think there’s a way to save Mexico’s new airport and make it better in the process: create a nature reserve around it.įive hundred years ago, lakes covered roughly 20 percent of the Valle de Mexico, a 3,500-square-mile valley in the country’s south-central region. I’m an expert in landscape architecture who studies the ecological adaption of urban environments. The airport project is now so divisive that Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the populist front-runner in the country’s 2018 presidential campaign, has suggested scrapping it entirely. It also hosts migrating flocks and is home to rare native species like the Mexican duck and Kentish plover.Īccording to the federal government’s environmental impact assessment, 12 threatened species and 1 endangered species live in the area. The new airport is located on a semi-dry lake bed that provides water for Mexico City and prevents flooding.

New airport in mexico city