Gabriela Simonetti: The challenge is very broad. I am probably going to leave out many things, but I would say energy generation and salmon farming - two conflicts that have remained very strong in the Magallanes region and that we do not seem to be advancing at the pace we need to in order to resolve.

 

At Alerta Isla Riesco, we spent more than ten years working for the closure of coal mining and finally that was achieved, but not because of a commitment of the State; there has not been a political commitment to end coal mining. And I say this because what happens in Chile is that the State is the owner of the minerals, including coal, so the State is the one that offers concessions on the coal so that it can be exploited. In Magallanes, we have about 6 billion tons of coal, so it is Magallanes who has to push for it to end. The government should not approve any more coal exploitation and burning projects. There must be a commitment from the State to end the chain of pollution.

 

Magallanes is a region that has been characterized by depending on fossil fuels, coal extraction, gas, etc., and we have to make a transition that allows us to achieve clean and renewable energy that does not depend on fossil fuels. But that means a tremendously important cultural change and it has to be done through a just transition that is respectful to the local culture, with the people who work here, with those who are impacted by the use of fossil fuels.

 

The arrival of green hydrogen seems to have opened the door to other possible ways of generating, storing and transporting energy in Magallanes, and that seems very interesting to me in the sense that until 2 or 3 years ago, when you talked about a different energy such as wind and others, we were view as naive, unpatriotic, destroyers of development. Today, it seems that even the most reticent places and defenders of coal seem to have come around to understanding this. They have seen that there are other possibilities.

 

I am not an expert in public policies regarding energy, but I believe that the State has already been doing it. Thanks to some reforms that were made during the Bachelet government, renewable energy has increased a lot. In addition to the incentives that the market is already providing for emissions, I believe that taxes on fossil fuels need to be increased. Chile has very low taxes, and on the other hand, I believe that what we need is to reform the environmental impact assessment system, which effectively incorporates much more efficient impact measurement mechanisms than they have been so far. The projects currently approved do not comply and the State does not have the capacity to supervise them, so it ends up being a vicious circle, where the problem is not only what type of energy is generated, but how it is being generated. For example, if a wind farm is installed in a place where the impact on the communities and the ecosystem is not taken into account, it is also a bad project.

 

One of Chile's challenges is to modify the environmental impact assessment system and there is a citizen and trade union proposal that was made some years ago on how to modify it and I believe that this is key.

 

From Argentina, the Futaleufú River flows across the Andes Mountains and empties into Lake Yelcho, in southern Chile. It is around this mighty, fast-moving river that Rocío González, who arrived here from the southern city of Puerto Montt at the end of 2013, found her perfect place to raise a family with her husband. What attracted this social worker who formerly worked for Chile's education ministry was the quality of life, she says. In the small town of Futaleufú, population 2,623, Rocio loves that every day she can listen to the flow of the river, contemplate the color of its waters, and marvel at the natural beauty of the surrounding landscape.