Ecologist Susanna Hecht is studying El Salvador's response to climate change, and she tells Yale Environment 360:
El Salvador and Central America take climate change seriously because they are getting nailed by these intense storms. As I always say, I never thought the future would come so soon. Last year El Salvador got hit so badly that the cost of recovering from storms and floods was much more than the costs of recuperating landscapes to build in more resilience to climate change. Now they see adaptation as the primary goal — it is the cost-effective thing to do.
