A huge park outside of Mexico City serves as a climate-adaptation model

Editor’s note: Paul Biasco first wrote about the Lake Texcoco Ecological Park for Ensia in early 2020. Here, the author revisits the park as it’s set to open to provide an update on the progress.    It’s unusually dry in this former lake bed in the Valley of Mexico. It hasn’t rained in weeks, and typically temperate Mexico City is in the midst of a heat wave. Residents are planning for a “day zero” situation, with water shortages impacting nearly every part of the city. Iñaki Echeverria points toward the edges of the horizon where the plateau of the Valley of Mexico is surrounded by two volcanoes and mountains that create a barrier around the city based 7,350 feet (2,240 meters) above sea level. “I remember as a child, snow almost up to the skirts [of the mountains] in normal times,” says Echeverria, an architect and landscape designer who has been tapped to lead the formation of the Lake Texcoco Ecological Park, an ecological restoration project in the valley that could end up being the largest urban park in the world. “[The lack of snow] is a very clear example of climate change, which is the context in which the project is being developed.” Today birds fill one of the lakes, bobbing on top of the blueish-green water and peering out through the brush. Scientists hope more than 150 species will inhabit the area once the park is complete. The wetlands are a sliver of an oasis that had been drained in one form or another over hundreds of years, starting with the founding of Tenochtitlan, the once-capital of the Aztec Empire, in the middle of a swampy lake bed. The city grew as a series of islands, and Spanish conquistadores later drained most of the lake system. As of 2015, Lake Texcoco had lost more than 95% of its surface. That same year, the lake was set to be drained completely as the site was chosen for a US$13 billion airport. But when Andrés Manuel López Obrador became president in 2018, he canceled the airport despite the fact it… Read More
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