Claudia Sheinbaum

Few world leaders can claim to know as much about climate science as Mexico’s new President Claudia Sheinbaum, a former academic who contributed to two major reports for the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She has a tricky path to tread, however, if she wants to live up to her scientific credentials while leading an oil-rich country plagued by drought and hurricanes.

Sheinbaum pushed forward some green policies in her previous role as mayor of Mexico City, introducing the capital’s first electric buses and covering the roof of its giant food market with solar panels. But she owes her political rise to her longtime mentor and powerful predecessor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. A resource nationalist, Lopez Obrador plowed billions into state oil firm Pemex, one of the world’s worst polluters, and cut the knees off the country’s buzzing clean energy market while enabling the destruction of swaths of rainforest. Sheinbaum now faces conflicting priorities. She has pledged to keep propping up Pemex while also delivering an “ambitious” state-led plan for the energy transition. “We all need strong, public state energy companies that guarantee clean energy at low prices to current and future generations,” she said at her inauguration on Oct. 1.

Her plan so far is light on detail, and some experts worry her promise to spend $13.6 billion on renewables won’t bring Mexico anywhere near her goal of 45% clean energy by 2030 if she doesn’t allow a larger private sector role. And while Sheinbaum struggled to make a dent in Mexico City’s water crisis, as president she has promised a major reform for equitable access across the country. Sheinbaum has already made a marked shift away from Lopez Obrador on green rhetoric, and if she lives up to those words her six-year term could turn a country brimming with renewable potential into a global climate leader.