Mexico’s likely next president Claudia Sheinbaum is a climate scientist but politics has kept her quiet on global warming
Mexico's likely next president, Claudia Sheinbaum co-authored the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, but her political mentor, President López Obrador, has pushed fossil fuels and she's been quiet on global warming.
MEXICO CITY — The López home kept filling with seawater as the Gulf of Mexico rose and winter storms got worse.
Cristina López and her family decided to leave after one bad storm in November, knowing the ocean would eventually devour their home in the fishing town of El Bosque.
“There was nowhere else to go,” said López, who now lives about a 20-minute drive away.
Driven by climate change, sea-level rise and increasingly ferocious storms are eroding thousands of miles of Mexico’s coastline facing both the Gulf and the Pacific Ocean. Around this country of nearly 130 million, drought is draining reservoirs dry and creating severe water shortages. Deadly heat is straining people and crops. Aging infrastructure is struggling to keep up.
But don’t expect the leading presidential candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, an environmental scientist and a co-author of the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, to make climate a central part of her campaign ahead of the June 2 election.
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