SEMARNAT Announces the Environmental Electronic Platform and its Operation in Mexico

Mexico’s Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales or SEMARNAT) published in the Federal Official Gazette (Diario Oficial de la Federación or DOF) on Jan. 8, 2025, the "Agreement Announcing the Environmental Electronic Platform (VEA) of the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources and Establishing its Operating Bases."

This agreement establishes the electronic site — the Environmental Electronic Platform (Ventanilla Electrónica Ambiental or VEA). Its purpose is to streamline and make environmental procedures and services more efficient, as well as to automate and simplify administrative processes before SEMARNAT with the aim of promoting sustainability and becoming a 100 percent paperless institution.

Contents of the Agreement

The agreement mainly establishes the following: 1) Operating Bases of the VEA and 2) Transition Provisions for in-person procedures and those entered through the VEA.

Operating Bases

• General provisions:
  • Definitions of relevance: 1) The environmental mailbox is the VEA subsystem through which the interested party can consult the electronic notifications related to their ongoing procedures and 2) The responsible area is the SEMARNAT unit responsible for receiving, analyzing or resolving the procedures submitted to the VEA.
  • Registration in VEA: The interested party must enter general identification information, email, and tax address and indicate whether they will be identified with an advanced electronic signature or only with their Unique Population Registry Code (Clave Única de Registro de Población or CURP). The promoter, whether a natural person or legal entity, may register profiles of legal representative, legal administrator and technician, among others.
• Environmental Mailbox:
  • For all applications, notices, responses to requests or any document submitted during the processing of procedures, as well as the practice of electronic notifications, the time zone of the tax domicile of the promoting person will be considered for legal purposes.
• Notifications:
  • The notification card is the official document with which a promoter is notified.
  • The environmental mailbox marks as received messages twice a month (Article 11 of the Electronic Signature Law, obligation to consult on the 15th and last day of each month). Likewise, the promoter is obliged to check the environmental mailbox twice a week.
  • The requirements, requests and final resolutions are notified through the VEA on business days and hours and will take effect on the day they were made.¹
  • When a letter is sent to the applicant, the VEA will issue a notice regarding the existence of the electronic document so that the applicant may be notified.
• Terms and Deadlines:
  • The deadlines for the promoters to satisfy the requirements begin the business day after the respective notification takes effect.
  • Procedures carried out after 6:00 p.m. or on non-working days will be considered to have been carried out on the following business day.
  • In the event of a failure in the system operation, the deadline for fulfilling requests will be understood to be extended to the next business day after the day on which the system has been restored.
• Operation VEA:
  • Log Number: The VEA generates a log number for each of the procedures entered.
  • Proof of Receipt: The VEA generates a document that serves as an acknowledgment of receipt called "proof of receipt" that promoters can use to demonstrate the delivery of requirements to the authority and/or incomplete or unsubmitted information.
  • Stages of the Procedure:
    • Integration of the Electronic File: SEMARNAT will integrate the file with the information provided by the applicant, as well as with the administrative acts signed by SEMARNAT.
    • Evaluation of the Procedure: SEMARNAT will integrate a digital version of all the documentation generated during the evaluation stage of the procedure until its final resolution.
    • Resolution: The notification of the resolution of the procedure will be delivered through the environmental mailbox.
  • Updates to VEA:
    • The procedures included in the VEA can only be updated when there is a modification or cancellation of the procedures registered in the National Catalogue of Regulations, Procedures and Services.

Transaction Provisions

• Entry into force: The entry into force of the agreement is Jan. 9, 2025, which is the day after its publication in the DOF.
• Subsequent agreements: Upon entry into force of the agreement, interested parties may register in the VEA. SEMARNAT will announce the procedures enabled in the VEA in subsequent agreements. With its publication, those procedures enabled in the VEA must be entered and consulted through this platform.
• National Electronic Procedures System: Procedures submitted to the National Electronic Procedures System (Sistema Nacional de Trámites Electrónicos or SINATEC) before the agreement came into force must continue to be handled through the same means.  

Please contact the authors for more information.

Notes

¹ The notification must be made within a maximum period of 10 days from the issuance of the resolution or the act to be notified.

Information contained in this alert is for the general education and knowledge of our readers. It is not designed to be, and should not be used as, the sole source of information when analyzing and resolving a legal problem, and it should not be substituted for legal advice, which relies on a specific factual analysis. Moreover, the laws of each jurisdiction are different and are constantly changing. This information is not intended to create, and receipt of it does not constitute, an attorney-client relationship. If you have specific questions regarding a particular fact situation, we urge you to consult the authors of this publication, your Holland & Knight representative or other competent legal counsel.