Nina Gualinga

Nina Gualinga (born June 1993) is an Ecuadorian environmental and indigenous rights activist. She is part of the Kichwa-speaking community and has spent most of her life advocating for better environmental protection of the Ecuadorian Amazon and the inhabitant wildlife as well as the people who are dependent on this environment.

Personal life Gualinga was born and raised in her mother's Kichwa-speaking community of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon, in Puyo, Pastaza. Her father is Anders Sirén, a Swedish-speaking Finnish professor of biology

Her involvement in advocating for climate justice and indigenous rights was inspired by her experience at the age of eight, when a representative of an oil company came to her village and offered them 10,000 dollars in exchange for drilling oil from their territory. She witnessed how the women of her village turned down the offer, advocating for the preservation of nature. a boarding school in Sigtuna, returning to Sarayaku during school holidays. and Gualinga's sister, Helena Gualinga, and mother, Noemí Gualinga are also environmental activists.

She is currently studying human rights at Lund University. She was also among the delegates advocating for "Living Forests" protection at the global climate conferences COP20 and COP21, in Lima and Paris respectively. In 2016, she was among a group of indigenous women from 7 nationalities that united to march in defense of indigenous rights and territories. Nina was also part of the WECAN delegation at the COP25 climate negotiations in Madrid in 2019. At the event, she called for the world to refrain from extracting fossil fuels and to listen to indigenous peoples, who have protected their lands for millennia, for solutions to the climate crisis: "If we don't listen to indigenous peoples, if we don't listen to indigenous women we are not going to get out of this crisis."

Awards 2018 WWF International President's Youth award