PARIS— The Center for Biological Diversity required “in danger” status today for a Mexican World Heritage website damaged by the U.S. border wall. The questionable U.S. wall cuts the world’s biggest swath of safeguarded desert environment in 2, walling off vital environment connection.
Today’s letter prompts the UNESCO World Heritage Committee to acknowledge that the wall is seriously destructive Mexico’s El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve and its borderland wildlife.
The Trump administration finished 455 miles of the border wall, consisting of a 30-foot-high section throughout the northern border of El Pinacate. The wall now runs along 3 secured borderland locations: El Pinacate in Mexico and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in the United States. Only 14 mountainous miles of the border along El Pinacate are now without a barrier.
“To protect this priceless World Heritage site, the Biden administration has to tear down this wall,” said Alejandro Olivera, senior researcher and Mexico agent at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Every day the border wall stays up, it causes more harm to El Pinacate and the whole desert ecosystem by preventing wildlife from moving freely. Animals like pronghorn and bighorn sheep that have migrated across the border for millennia are now stuck on one side, sometimes unable to find food and water.”
UNESCO designated El Pinacate Reserve as a World Heritage property in 2013 in acknowledgment of the location’s exceptional biodiversity. The reserve is home to desert wildlife that progressed over countless years, easily crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. The wall obstructs important motion and migration, pieces environment, and limitations animals’ capability to discover a mate and look for food and water throughout the extreme Sonoran Desert.
Under the World Heritage Convention, a website might be noted as “in danger” if “development projects” or “major public works” threaten the natural worths the website was designated to secure. An “in danger” classification will focus global attention on El Pinacate and its environment, along with the environmental and cultural hazards positioned by the U.S. border wall.
The types blocked by the wall consist of the Sonoran pronghorn, flat-tail horned lizard, Yuma fringe-toed lizard, Sonoyta pupfish, Sonoyta mud turtle, lower long-nose and fish-eating bats, Goode’s horned lizard, mountain lion, coyotes, Mexican bighorn sheep, Sonoran desert tortoise, mule deer, jaguars, and even low-flying owls.
Preliminary study results suggest the Pinacate population of Sonoran pronghorn decreased from 126 animals in 2020 to 85 in 2022. Water tanks and sanctuaries have actually been divided and are now unattainable to wildlife on the Pinacate side. For example, Quitobaquito Springs is now inaccessible from Mexico.
The wall likewise hurts the Tohono O’odham individuals, who traditionally populated El Pinacate and whose conventional lands are divided by the U.S.-Mexico border. El Pinacate is spiritual to the Tohono O’odham, and the website is routinely utilized for ritualistic functions, consisting of a spiritual salt expedition from the United States throughout the border to Mexico’s Gulf of California.
