ENVIRONMENTAL GEOLOGY STUDIES - STATE OF THE ART IN MEXICO

During last two decades (1980 to 2000) environmental geology studies has been carried out in several states of Mexico and some educational programs nowadays include environmental aspects. This work reports the main aspects of goverment and privated programs about regional impact, social protection and education and we comment their balance.

Most goverment and social concern is about nature conservation and sustainable development, as a result federal agency SEMARNAT and National Institute of Ecology (INE) worked out strong legislation to preserve environment. At present many federal and state goverments are working hard to acomplish some established goals, such as having sanitary land fields in all our counties (municipios; a mexican geopolitical subdivision) to the end of year 2000. However, for many of them it still seems to be a hard goal to acomplish and nowadays they are out of time and are been fine by federal institutions due to the lack of studies or works in progress. We present the case of Tlalnepantla sanitary landfill as an example of progressive development the in State of Mexico. As a temporal solution many counties are working hard in land sanitation, to cover and reduce contamination produced by waste disposal sites; even thought, there are many clandestine waste disposal areas surrounding our main cities in the country and they can be soon a sanitary public problem.

About waste water treatment plants, an example of Baja California State (NW Mexico), is given, including its history since exploration and construction to present time; furthermore, the option of mega plants construction for water treatment, in our main cities, is commented. Hazardous waste landfill sites or projects (CIMARIs or SIMARIs) are only soft mentioned due to lack of present work about them.

On hydroelectric development very serious work has been done by CFE to reduce environmental and social impact and we exposes two cases: Aguamilpa Power Plant (PP), Nayarit State and Zimapan PP, Hidalgo-Queretaro States, in which important work was performed in order to reduce affectations and we also mention the environmental protection planned for future hydroelectric projects.

Finally, a general overview on geological risk studies and environmental geology education is reported (with emphasis on posgraduated stuidies).