Adejera student Victoria Ballesteros has just won another medal as an environmental activist. Despite her youth -she has just reached the age of majority-, she has already accumulated three interventions in UN forums dedicated to science and women. The last one was held last Friday and brought together 80 public officials and experts who presented their points of view on “the water that unites us”, the title of the online meeting in which, among others, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres; the Vice President and Minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, as well as the Presidents of Portugal, Slovenia and Malta.
Ballesteros, who studies International Economics at Illinois Wesleyan University (United States), took part in two debates. In the first, he called for action and called for more investment to protect and renew hydraulic structures. “The water crisis is real and the inaction we see is based on false excuses, as there are affordable techniques that can be applied if governments, companies and individuals so choose.” In his opinion, “the commitment to the most advanced technologies and projects cannot be an impediment to starting to act right now”.
In her second participation, during a live conversation with the Secretary General of the United Nations, several ambassadors and various representatives of the scientific community, the young Tenerife woman warned about language barriers and their consequences when remedying the lack of resources.
After assuring that “the fear of the water war continues to be a reality, a product of lack of action and inequality,” Ballesteros insisted that accessing content and information in international debates is an obstacle if the English, “when numerous studies have shown that the regions most affected by the water crisis are and will be places where this language is not the official or native language”, a circumstance that leads him to affirm that it “discriminates”, by blocking “the most affected”, and it is “counterproductive”, since “they are the ones who best know the situation and, therefore, what measures would be the most effective”.
The former student of the Ichasagua institute in Los Cristianos, one of the great international youth activists against climate change, has been the only young Spanish woman who has participated in the United Nations meeting on the occasion of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, where she has once again surprised with a set of reflections that she herself summarized in a final sentence: “Science will be unstoppable when all ideas are added and no one is left behind; As long as this cannot be achieved, gaps in development will continue to exist”.
