Lourdes Ayala Santos

Age 51.
Vega Baja, Puerto Rico

Lourdes Ayala Santos works for an engineering firm, and because her husband lost his job, her income now supports both of them and their two teenage children; their per capita household income is less than the Puerto Rican average. Like most Puerto Ricans, they have running water and electricity at home; they also have two cars.

Their home is near the coast, close to Playa Puerto Nuevo, at about 13 meters above sea level. Conscious about the environment, they use no air-conditioning and have “energy-saver” appliances, plus a solar water heater. She’s also aware of the problems that drought or contamination could cause to the water supply, and worries about how poorly water is treated.

She says she has seen climate-change impacts already: erosion, dried-out land, and changes in the sea and in the flora and fauna. Yet children and youth are not getting educated about climate change in the schools, she notes – because of government ignorance.

“The future is theirs,” she says. “There are no intensive campaigns, no legislation, because they figure we’re far from the poles and will have time to regenerate our ecosystems. But they’re wrong – if we keep going like this, we won’t just have drought; we’ll have no water at all. We won’t have to worry about species going extinct, because they’ll be gone already. We won’t have to worry about our health, because we won’t be alive. I worry about my children, because although I have educated them about what could come in the future, they alone can’t change things. We need to work as a team to save our planet.”