IT Blog

Editor’s Note: This article is part of Fast Company Spark, a new initiative for middle and high school readers.

The sharp fear of not having enough clean water to drink starting at six years old, as I was growing up in a working-class neighborhood at the south periphery of Puebla city in Mexico, is an experience I’ll never forget. It showed me a side of the climate crisis that people are experiencing around the world, and what happens when powerful countries and corporations put profit over people and the planet. Today, at 19, my childhood experiences are what energize me to organize with the Fridays for Future movement, a youth-led global collective that advocates for systemic climate action.

Water scarcity is one of the many repercussions of climate change that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns about in their latest report. The report paints a grim reality of global droughts, superstorms, extreme heat and flooding at a devastating…