Eco House Program: Mexico Aims to Cut Home Energy Use with Green Loan Plan Talli Nauman - Thomson Reuters Foundation
go to original June 27, 2013

Workers from VINTE, a Mexican construction firm, build energy-efficient homes in the Hidalgo state capital of Pachuca. (Thomson Reuters Foundation/Monica Healy)

MEXICO CITY – Since the 1980s, the Mexican government has subsidised massive tract-housing projects around the country, filling them with hundreds of thousands of concrete-block, brick and mortar structures that have no insulation or other comfort control features.

This response to intense pressure for affordable urban housing is to blame for widespread urban sprawl in Mexico over the last 30 years – and increases in climate-changing emissions, experts say. Homes now use 16 percent of the country’s energy and account for 3 percent of direct greenhouse gas emissions, as well as a variety of indirect ones, according to the country’s Social Development Ministry.

That rising urban carbon footprint is one reason the country’s climate change policymakers see cutting residential emissions as essential for reaching Mexico’s 2050 target to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half from 2002 levels.

To accomplish the needed cut, they have turned to a so-called Eco House programme, which Gisela Campillo Bermudo,  leader of the Inter-American Development Bank’s infrastructure and environment team, says is new in Latin America.

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