Mongabay’s reporting on a long-stalled conservation law in Sonora, Mexico, documented both the growing development pressures facing privately protected land and the unexplained bureaucratic delay preventing a new legal protection from taking effect.
In June 2022, Sonora’s Congress unanimously approved the Real Right of Conservation (Derecho Real de Conservación in Spanish), a new legal tool allowing willing landowners to enter into long-term agreements restricting development on their land while permitting agreed activities such as grazing, tourism or sustainable hunting. Participating landowners can also receive municipal tax incentives. The designation was the first perpetual conservation easement of its kind for individual properties in Mexico.
But before the law could take effect, it had to be published in Sonora’s official legal register. For more than two years, that did not happen.
Mongabay reported on the delay as development pressures were mounting around some of the places the law was intended to help protect. The 22,600-hectare (56,000-acre) Northern Jaguar Reserve lies just 2 km from a lithium deposit included in Mexico’s first national lithium mining zone. Elsewhere in Sonora, two areas already holding federal voluntary conservation designations had faced industrial development pressures: El Bajío amid a long-running dispute over gold mining, and Aribabi Ranch, where government maps showed a planned railway passing through protected land.
The law was finally published in the state register on July 1, 2024. About two weeks later, Mongabay documented the two-year delay, conflicting explanations over why the measure had stalled, and the remaining wait for implementation guidelines before the first conservation agreement could be established. At the time, both the Northern Jaguar Reserve and La Colorada Park planned to seek the new designation and advocates hoped Sonora’s example could encourage similar legislation elsewhere in Mexico.
Impact
What Mongabay learned afterward suggested that the reporting process itself may have contributed to ending the two-year delay.
While reporting the story, Mongabay contributor Daniel Shailer repeatedly contacted state officials seeking an explanation for why the approved law had not been published. “We drafted a story with their non-responses, then a few days before publishing that, the law appeared in the register,” Shailer said, and suggested that the reporting itself prompted this development.
Shailer later said that a source within the Sonora legislature told him on background that Mongabay’s reporting had precipitated the law’s publication. Although Mongabay cannot independently verify that account because the original correspondence is no longer available, the chronology is clear: the law was published while Shailer was actively seeking answers from state officials about its unexplained two-year delay.
Officials continued moving the law forward after it entered into force. By early 2026, Shailer shared back with Mongabay that implementation guidelines had been published and funding allocated for an event marking the first conservation agreements.
On June 16, 2026, conservation organizations and Sonora state representatives gathered for the signing of the first contract under the Real Right of Conservation framework. The agreement between Parque La Colorada and Naturaleza y Cultura Sierra Madre established a long-term voluntary conservation commitment in southern Sonora. Wildlands Network, which had advocated for the mechanism for years, said agreements of this kind could help maintain connected habitat for jaguars, mountain lions, black bears and other wide-ranging species.
The questions reporters ask while gathering information for a story can often contribute to accountability. In this case, Mongabay’s reporting contributed renewed scrutiny to a legal process that had remained inactive for more than two years. The subsequent adoption of the first conservation agreement shows the practical significance of this mechanism coming into force, which enables landowners in Sonora the opportunity to make long-term, legal commitments to habitat conservation.
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Banner image: The Northern Jaguar Reserve now sits close to a recently declared lithium mining zone. Image courtesy of the Northern Jaguar Reserve.