NAFTA’s environmental legacy

What has been the environmental impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the US-Mexico borderlands, 25 years on?

This study reported on the long-term environmental impacts of the North American Free Trade Agreement and its environmental side-agreement in the US-Mexico borderlands. We examined changes in drivers and indicators of environmental change to assess NAFTA’s legacy at 25 years though a combination of literature review and dataset analysis. We also used expert interviews and an online survey to gather informed, perceptual assessments of environmental change related to the agreement. We found that NAFTA’s environmental institutions improved environmental infrastructure and public participation, especially in the first ten years after implementation, but that severe regional water scarcity and degradation had resulted from provisions in NAFTA that drove expansions of both mining and export agriculture in border states. These findings challenged polarized debates around free trade and environmental protections that have tended to assess NAFTA on ideological grounds and have paid inadequate attention to data and attribution.