Environment Minister Francisca Toledo will send official requests to the country's regional governments (gores) and municipalities. She wants to determine how much progress they have made on their Regional and Municipal Climate Change Action Plans. The announcement comes a day after the mudslide that affected the municipality of Las Condes, in the Metropolitan Region.
According to Emol, the review focuses on the actions each territory committed to taking to prevent risks and protect people from extreme climate events.
These plans are instruments established by the Framework Law on Climate Change. They serve as local road maps: each region and municipality sets out the measures it will take to address climate change. The sources do not specify how many regional governments or municipalities already have a plan or how many plans are still being developed.
"The first step is to have planning instruments in place, and the next is for the actions committed to in them to translate into results that reduce risks and protect families," Toledo explained.
The official requests will seek information on plans under development and initiatives already committed to. The focus will be on preventing mudslides, floods and mass movements (landslides involving earth, rocks or mud moving down a slope).
The ministry will review four types of measures: ravine management, restoration of vegetation cover, soil stabilization and nature-based solutions. This last concept encompasses interventions that use ecosystems, such as vegetation on a slope, to reduce risks.
The ministry did not attribute the Las Condes mudslide to climate change in its announcement. It presented it as the trigger for a review of compliance with local adaptation commitments.
Using the information collected, the ministry will monitor the extent to which each action has been implemented and seek to improve coordination among the responsible agencies. The sources do not report a deadline for regional governments and municipalities to respond.
As its next step, the ministry will compile a national inventory of adaptation measures for mudslides. At a later stage, it will conduct a similar survey on wildfire prevention and adaptation.
