Carlos Lopez (he/him) is a 17-year-old high school student in San Diego, California who grew up near the Southern California coastline but spent most of his childhood outside surf and beach culture, kept out by cost and by the sense that the water belonged to someone else. That gap shapes the environmental justice work he now leads.
Carlos’s career in environmental conservation began with Save Oceanside Sand, a community science nonprofit where he has run monthly GNSS RTK shoreline transect surveys at Oceanside, feeding a dataset used by SANDAG and the Oceanside Coastal Zone Administrator. That work is separate from the Save Oceanside Sand Club, which he founded at El Camino High School and later merged with the school’s Environmental Club to form the Youth Conservation Alliance, the coastal science organization at a Title I campus that is 73 percent Latino. Through the Alliance, Carlos put Scripps-level coastal research in front of students who had never had a way into a research institution. He also serves as a School Site Council representative at El Camino, advocating for resource allocation that reflects the needs of first-generation and working-class students.
As an Ocean Mentor with Un Mar de Colores, Carlos taught water safety, ocean mechanics, and environmental conservation to middle school students in Oceanside, a city with four miles of surfable coastline that many of its own residents never access. The barriers he saw there trace back to redlining and economic exclusion that have long kept Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and low-income families off the water. He has continued volunteering with the organization into the fall, running lessons for its ongoing youth programs.
That commitment extends beyond his own coastline. Carlos was selected as a Climate Cardinals Fellow for the 2026–2027 cohort, one of roughly 30 fellows chosen from 6,629 applicants across 133 countries, 92 percent from the Global South. On the organization’s Programs/Chapters team, he supports a network of more than 130 youth-led chapters across 35 countries.
As Oceanside Intern for SanDiego350’s Youth4Climate program, Carlos is leading a coalition of nine Oceanside high schoolers on a campaign for an Oceanside Unified School District resolution to phase out fossil fuels across district infrastructure by 2035, targeting the same school buildings his own community’s children sit in every day. The coalition has drafted formal resolution language, built research packets, and secured a school board member as the resolution’s primary champion. He has also traveled to Sacramento to deliver public comment before the California Senate Environmental Quality Committee on offshore drilling legislation.
Carlos is currently a Conservation Leadership Fellow with the UCSD Conservation Leadership Program at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, mentored by Jorge Toledo-Marin, Project Scientist at Coastal Environments, on restoration work at the San Dieguito Lagoon. He intends to continue studying the ocean and the communities connected to it throughout his higher education, and to build a career on the premise that coastal science and coastal justice are the same project.