Biodiversity Finance Journal

How Mexico Pays for Conservation

Once a year the Mexican statistics institute publishes a table that ranks, by share, what the public sector spent its environmental protection money on. In the edition covering 2024, released on 1 December 2025, air and climate took 32.2 per cent and water resource management 20.8 per cent. Tenth and last of the ten lines, at 2.9 per cent, is the protection and conservation of biodiversity. The year before it had been 3.6 per cent, eighth of ten. The table is short, it is official, and it is the plainest statement available of where nature sits in Mexican environmental spending.

The totals that percentage applies to are large. Public environmental protection spending in 2024 came to 232,882 million pesos, which the institute puts at 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product. Against it stands the cost of environmental depletion and degradation, which the same accounts price at a little over 1.38 trillion current pesos, or 4.1 per cent of gross domestic product. That ratio has been improving on one reading: in 2003 the cost of depletion and degradation stood at 6.0 per cent of output. It has been improving very slowly, and degradation rather than depletion is almost all of what remains, at 3.7 per cent of output against 0.4.

An account that had to be built before it could be read

Mexico can produce those figures because somebody spent eight years constructing the accounting category that holds them. Mexico joined the UNDP biodiversity finance programme in 2015 and began working with the statistics institute on a shared method for estimating what the public sector spends on biodiversity; the first publication out of that collaboration came in 2018. The method takes the institute's existing environmental protection expenditure figure, built from current spending chapters and investment chapters of the public accounts, and multiplies each line by an attribution coefficient. Spending whose primary purpose is biodiversity carries a coefficient of one and counts in full. Spending whose effect on biodiversity is secondary carries a coefficient below one and counts in part. Those coefficients are what let the estimate reach past the environment ministry's own budget into education, enforcement, agriculture, fisheries and social development, and they are also the single most contestable thing in the exercise, which is why the review that publishes them explains how they were set and records that they were validated with the programme's partners and counterparts.

In August 2023 the calculation stopped being a project and became a line in the national accounts. The institute adopted total environmental protection spending in favour of biodiversity as an additional account within its environmental activity accounts, published alongside the rebasing of the national accounts to 2018, initially as a series running from 2003 to 2021, with 2022 added that December. The expenditure review for 2022, published in September 2024, states that this makes Mexico the only country in the programme with an institutionalised expenditure figure published annually. That is the review's own claim about its own programme and is reported here as such, but the underlying fact is checkable and unusual: the number now updates whether or not anyone is running a project to produce it.

What the series shows is not encouraging for anybody who assumed measurement drives money. In constant 2018 pesos the lowest year in the record is 2003, at 13,931,345 thousand pesos, and the highest is 2013, at 27,418,397 thousand. The trend since 2013 has been downward. Over the most recent three years of the series the categories that grew were knowledge, sustainable use and biodiversity planning; every other category fell.

The ministry's budget halved, and its spending did not

The clearest single table in the expenditure review is the one comparing what the Mexican congress approved for the environment ministry with what the ministry actually accrued, over ten years, in constant 2018 pesos. In 2013 the approved figure was 74,012.11 million and the accrued 74,254.67 million. By 2021, which is the low point of the series, the approved figure was 27,939.57 million, a cut of roughly 62 per cent in real terms in eight years. The last year in the table, 2022, recovers to 33,799.38 million approved, still 54 per cent below 2013. On either endpoint it is the fiscal fact that governs everything else on this page.

The second thing the table shows is stranger. From 2017 onwards, every single year, the ministry accrued more than it had been approved: 42,375.46 against 38,157.26 in 2017, 43,781.35 against 37,580.64 in 2018, 35,688.18 against 30,175.54 in 2019, 32,732.99 against 27,993.86 in 2020, 35,242.93 against 27,939.57 in 2021, and 47,056.01 against 33,799.38 in 2022. Before that the relationship ran the other way, the ministry spending less than it was given in 2014, 2015 and 2016. Something changed in 2017, and it changed in the direction of the approved budget becoming a floor that gets topped up in year rather than a ceiling. Reading the approved column alone, which is what a budget-day report does, understates the environment ministry's real position by between a tenth and two fifths depending on the year.

What the protected areas get

Mexico's protected area system starts in 1917, with the decree creating Desierto de los Leones National Park. It now runs to 226 areas covering 93,807,804.36 hectares, made up of 78 national parks, 54 flora and fauna protection areas, 48 biosphere reserves, 28 sanctuaries, 13 natural resource protection areas and 5 natural monuments. Spending on those areas is the one part of the biodiversity expenditure estimate that needs no attribution coefficient at all, because the whole of it counts.

In constant 2018 pesos the protected areas budget peaked in 2016 at 1,555.56 million. It was 1,161.90 million in 2017, 1,132.00 million in 2018, 820.04 million in 2019, 814.43 million in 2020, 771.84 million in 2021 and 734.88 million in 2022. The review introduces that table as CONANP's approved budget under the federal expenditure decree, then says both the approved and the accrued basis appear in its figures according to what was available, and the trend it goes on to discuss is the accrued one. The series is not on a single clean basis and the review does not claim it is. It sets that decline against an increase in protected surface in 2017 and then declines to resolve it, saying only that a detailed analysis would be needed to establish whether a falling budget means the money is being spent more efficiently or means there are needs going unmet, and that such an analysis is worth doing.

The current federal budget puts the same question in current pesos, which cannot be compared with the constant-price series above and is not compared with it here. For 2026 the environment ministry's whole appropriation is 45,564,073,902 pesos. The national water commission takes 37,689,110,439 of that, or nearly 83 per cent. The forestry commission takes 2,589,652,339. The protected areas commission takes 1,502,268,352, which is 3.3 per cent of the ministry it belongs to and about a twenty fifth of what the water commission receives. That last attribution needs stating carefully. The figure is printed in the budget, but text extraction shuffles that table's labels away from its values, so the row it sits on was established two ways: the table's own subtotals close to the peso only if this value is the commission's, and the budget's programmatic annex prints unit F00 against the commission by name. The environmental prosecutor gets 827,072,298, the hydrocarbons sector safety and environmental protection agency 353,465,344, the water technology institute 192,811,167 and the ecology and climate change institute 159,259,589. Within the protected areas commission's own allocation, the sustainable development conservation programme, which the same annex prints under unit F00 and which the budget classifies as a subsidy governed by published operating rules, is 167,587,023 pesos, almost all of it capital rather than running cost. The budget also carries a separately printed line for expansions to protected area management determined by the Chamber of Deputies, which is a reminder that the final figure is settled in a legislature and not in a ministry.

The gap has a number, and the number is old

Mexico priced its own shortfall in 2018. The needs assessment costed what the national biodiversity strategy and its action plan to 2030 would take to deliver, set that against what was being spent, and put the annual gap at 8,685 million pesos, which the document itself converts to USD 461.9 million. Filling it would mean spending 46.7 per cent more each year than the government then was. Inside that total the protected areas gap was 1,128 million pesos a year and the unmet demand for the payment for environmental services programme was 3,868 million. Roughly three quarters of what was needed was recurrent cost rather than capital, which matters because recurrent cost is the kind that a one off grant cannot fix.

The assessment also did something more useful than sizing the gap, which was to put the gap next to the damage. Biodiversity-related depletion and degradation costs in 2015 came to 184.4 billion pesos, about 1 per cent of output that year, and 67.2 per cent of that was attributed to primary sector activity. The shortfall in conservation funding, on the same document's numbers, is around five per cent of the annual environmental cost that conservation is trying to offset.

What Mexico has published since is a plan rather than a new number. The finance plan organises its proposals into five families: integrating biodiversity into the planning instruments of strategic sectors, climate finance, local conservation mechanisms, sustainable business and impact investment, and greening the financial sector, with two cross-cutting lines on international finance and on economic analysis. Several of those depend on instruments that the OECD tracks internationally in its policy instruments database, which held more than 4,590 environment-relevant instruments across 146 countries at the 2024 update, among them 227 biodiversity-positive taxes in force in 70 countries and 301 biodiversity-positive fees in 75. That database is where a country-by-country comparison of these instruments would have to start.

Sources

Every figure, date and deal name above is drawn from one of the documents below. Each was fetched and cached on the retrieval date shown.

  1. INEGI, Cuentas Economicas y Ecologicas de Mexico 2024. Press release 150/25, 1 December 2025, with the technical note: the environmentally adjusted net domestic product, the total cost of depletion and degradation against gross domestic product, public environmental protection spending, and the functional table in which biodiversity is the smallest of ten lines https://www.inegi.org.mx/contenidos/saladeprensa/boletines/2025/ee/CEEM2024_CP.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
  2. INEGI, Cuentas Economicas y Ecologicas de Mexico 2023. Press release 690/24, 2 December 2024, the preceding edition, carrying the same functional table one year earlier https://www.inegi.org.mx/contenidos/saladeprensa/boletines/2024/CEEM/CEEM2023.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
  3. PNUD Mexico, Analisis del Gasto en Biodiversidad en Mexico 2022, September 2024. The expenditure review: the harmonisation of the environmental protection account with the attribution coefficient method, the account's institutionalisation at INEGI in August 2023, the environment ministry's approved and accrued budget from 2013 to 2022, and the protected areas budget series from 2002 to 2022 https://www.biofin.org/sites/default/files/content/knowledge_products/050924_BER_Disen%CC%83o.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
  4. PNUD Mexico, Evaluacion de necesidades de financiamiento para la biodiversidad en Mexico 2017-2020, 2018. The needs assessment: the annual gap in pesos and dollars, the protected areas component, the ecosystem service payment component, and the biodiversity-related share of environmental depletion and degradation costs https://www.biofin.org/sites/default/files/content/knowledge_products/FNA_Evaluacion_final___comprimido.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
  5. PNUD Mexico, Plan de Soluciones de Financiamiento para Biodiversidad en Mexico. The finance plan, whose five solution families and two cross-cutting lines are the published statement of what Mexico intends to do about the gap https://www.biofin.org/sites/default/files/content/knowledge_products/PlanSF%20Mexico_VFlimpio.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
  6. BIOFIN, Mexico. The programme's current country page, which restates the needs assessment result in dollars and splits it between the protected areas gap, the ecosystem service payment demand and the national strategy https://www.biofin.org/mexico Retrieved 2026-08-30
  7. Secretaria de Hacienda y Credito Publico, Presupuesto de Egresos de la Federacion 2026, Ramo 16: Analisis Administrativo Economico. The appropriation for the environment ministry broken down by responsible unit, from which the share going to the protected areas commission is fixed by arithmetic closure https://www.pef.hacienda.gob.mx/work/models/P3f26115/PEF2026/y6k1r4r1/docs/16/r16_aae.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
  8. Secretaria de Hacienda y Credito Publico, Presupuesto de Egresos de la Federacion 2026, Ramo 16: Resumen Economico por Destino del Gasto. The printed total for the environment ministry and its split between current and investment spending https://www.pef.hacienda.gob.mx/work/models/P3f26115/PEF2026/y6k1r4r1/docs/16/r16_redg.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
  9. Secretaria de Hacienda y Credito Publico, Presupuesto de Egresos de la Federacion 2026, Ramo 16: Programas Presupuestarios en Clasificacion Economica. The budget programme lines, including the sustainable development conservation programme and the separately printed expansion line for protected area management https://www.pef.hacienda.gob.mx/work/models/P3f26115/PEF2026/y6k1r4r1/docs/16/r16_ppcer.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
  10. Secretaria de Hacienda y Credito Publico, Presupuesto de Egresos de la Federacion 2026, Ramo 16: Analisis Funcional Programatico Economico. The table that prints each responsible unit against its clave, which is what ties unit F00 to the protected areas commission and the sustainable development conservation programme to that unit https://www.pef.hacienda.gob.mx/work/models/P3f26115/PEF2026/y6k1r4r1/docs/16/r16_afpe.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
  11. OECD, Tracking Economic Instruments and Finance for Biodiversity 2024. The count of biodiversity-positive taxes, fees, tradable permits, subsidies, ecosystem service payments and offsets in the OECD policy instruments database, and the revenue they raise. Cited for the global instrument counts only: the report contains no Mexico row https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/data/insights/data-explainers/2024/10/tracking-economic-instruments-and-finance-for-biodiversity-2024/OECD-Tracking-Economic-Instruments-and-Finance-for-Biodiversity-2024.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30