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Santa Fe is my hometown. The people who have lived here — from the First Nations to present-day residents — have always been mindful of the limited water supply, but it wasn’t until college that I learned just how precarious the situation is. Climate change, population growth and other factors could lead to a severe water shortage by the middle of this century.

Santa Fe’s very existence is jeopardized by climate change, and it’s hardly alone.  Climate change has intensified the drought in California, which has left many wells in California’s agricultural Central Valley without water.

Communities vulnerable to flooding have the opposite problem, as we saw in Louisiana last month when 7.1 trillion gallons of rain fell in one week. Worldwide, average temperature records are broken month after month, with increasingly adverse effects the world over. And rising sea levels are already causing more destructive and dangerous storm surges, as we witnessed with Hurricane Matthew last week.

Climate change will affect my career, my family, my community, my everything. For my generation, millennials, it is so much more than the “environmental” issue previous generations understood it to be.

How should young women think about family planning in places like Florida, when faced with the increased threat of Zika virus? If we do have kids, where will we raise them when communities like my hometown are running out of water?  Should we even consider a career move to San Francisco or New York (not to mention Miami or New Orleans), when cities along the ocean face stronger storm surges, hurricanes and sea level rise?

Climate change makes this presidential election terrifyingly urgent for someone my age — we cannot afford a leader who will allow irreparable harm to the home we share.

That’s why I work with Defend Our Future, a climate change initiative engaging young voters, as part of my work at the Environmental Defense Fund. We work with young people across the political spectrum — Republicans, Democrats, independents and everyone else — to push solutions to climate change. Right now, we’re registering millennials throughout the country to vote so they can champion environmental action and stewardship in the face of climate change……… http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-10-12/here-s-why-many-young-voters-see-climate-change-issue-2016