Mexico’s government has designated 20 new protected areas across 12 states and two coastal zones, adding roughly 2.3 million hectares — about 5.7 million acres — to the country’s conservation network. The announcement brings the total number of protected areas created under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to 43, covering more than 3 million hectares, more than any previous Mexican administration.
At a glance
- Mexico protected areas: The 20 new designations include four national parks, four flora and fauna protection areas, seven sanctuaries, two biosphere reserves, and three natural resources protection areas — all under the National Commission of Protected Natural Areas (CONANP).
- Bajos del Norte national park: The largest new site, covering 1.3 million hectares in the Gulf of Mexico, protects critical grouper spawning grounds, hawksbill turtles (Eretmochelys imbricata), rocky star coral (Orbicella annularis), and the livelihoods of more than 3,000 fishing families on the Yucatán coast.
- Sierra Tecuani biosphere reserve: This 348,140-hectare reserve in Guerrero formalizes protections for jaguar (Panthera onca) habitat that Indigenous ejido communities have monitored and managed without government support for over a decade.
What the new designations protect
The 20 sites span habitats from coral reefs and coastal marine zones to dry scrubland and montane forest. Whale sharks (Rhincodon typus), Mexican prairie dogs (Cynomys mexicanus), and jaguars all stand to benefit from expanded legal protection.
In Oaxaca alone, three new sanctuaries — Playa Morro Ayuta, Barra de la Cruz-Playa Grande, and Playa Cahuitán — protect nesting beaches for sea turtles along the Pacific coast. Other new areas stretch across Quintana Roo, Veracruz, Campeche, Nayarit, Zacatecas, Chiapas, Colima, Durango, Jalisco, Chihuahua, and the State of Mexico.
The Semidesierto Zacatecas Flora and Fauna Protection Area is designed specifically to support the recovery of the Mexican prairie dog, a keystone species whose burrow systems support dozens of other animals in the country’s arid north.
Indigenous stewardship at the center
Some of the most significant conservation work in the newly protected zones was already underway — carried out by Indigenous and peasant communities long before any government decree arrived.
Joaquín Núñez Medrano, secretary of the Union of Forestry and Agricultural Ejidos Hermenegildo Galeana, has lived and worked in the ejido Cordón Grande in the Sierra Grande of Guerrero for years. His community has tracked jaguars and managed forest resources sustainably for more than a decade, entirely without outside funding. His ejido now falls inside the new Sierra Tecuani Biosphere Reserve.
“The goal is to strengthen what we have already been doing but with support to do it much better,” Núñez Medrano told Mongabay.
That framing — formal protection building on existing community effort — represents a meaningful shift in how conservation can work. Rather than imposing restrictions on communities from above, the Sierra Tecuani designation acknowledges and amplifies Indigenous-led stewardship. Gustavo Sánchez, president of the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests, has long argued that empowering local and Indigenous communities is the most durable path to forest protection.
The funding gap that conservationists can’t ignore
The new protected areas arrive against a difficult fiscal backdrop. Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) absorbed an 11.4% budget cut in 2024, according to a report by the Noroeste Civil Society for Environmental Sustainability (NOSSA). Over six years, the administration has allocated 35% less to the environmental department than its predecessor.
That works out to approximately 10.7 pesos — about $0.63 — per hectare to manage all 225 of Mexico’s protected areas in 2024.
“The personnel from CONANP are heroic,” said Juan Bezaury-Creel of Fundación BD BioDiversidad Mexicana. “They are putting their lives on the line many times with little budget and little help.”
Gustavo Alanis-Ortega of the Mexican Environmental Law Center was more pointed: “If there is no money, no personnel and no material resources to take care of these areas, it is not clear how, in practice, they are really going to be conserved.”
The Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection, which monitors compliance with conservation laws, saw an 8% budget increase in 2024 — but still operates with nearly 30% fewer resources than it had in 2016. Without sufficient staff and equipment, verifying that the new decrees are being respected will be genuinely difficult.
Gina Chacón, director of the Wildland Network‘s public policy program in Mexico, called the announcements “a commendable step toward biodiversity conservation” while noting that some environmental and Indigenous groups remain wary that budget cuts could limit what protection means in practice.
A decree, as Bezaury-Creel put it, is better than nothing — once formalized, it creates a legal duty to protect. But turning that duty into real conservation outcomes will require more than paper designations. The communities already doing the work on the ground, like those in Guerrero’s ejidos, may end up carrying more of that load than any government budget currently anticipates.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Mongabay
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights recognized across 160 million hectares ahead of COP30
- Ghana establishes a new marine protected area at Cape Three Points
- The Good News for Humankind archive on Mexico
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