In this blog, I present the questions that I put to the Presidency Youth Climate Champion (PYCC), Marcele Oliveira, before and after COP30. Marcele was appointed by the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in May 2025. This role represents an important step in attempts to strengthen meaningful youth participation in global climate decision-making. The conversation explores what this role entails, its responsibilities and the broader importance of youth leadership within the COP process.
- As Youth Climate Champion, what’s your mission and role in the run-up to, and during, COP30?
The role of Youth Climate Champion within the COP Presidency was created at COP28, held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in 2023. Its objective was to ensure a strategic role that expands opportunities for global youth engagement in environmental debates and incorporates the perspectives of children and adolescents into the proposals discussed at the Climate Summits.
The first PYCC (Presidency Youth Climate Champion) was Leyla Hasanova, from Azerbaijan, during COP29, and Brazil’s term represents the second mandate worldwide. In Brazil, the selection process took place through an open call, in which 154 young people applied and 24 advanced to a shortlist of eligible candidates.
The appointment by President Lula carries the responsibility of leading a path of broad social participation in the environmental debate, both inside and outside the gates of COP30, spearheading the Global Mobilisation against Climate Change from the perspective of young people, our biomes, Indigenous peoples, Latin America, and the Global South.
- How are you making sure youth from the Amazon and across Brazil are part of this COP?
I am the second person in the world to hold this role. When Brazil announced the selection process, instead of applying individually, we organised ourselves as a youth movement. We came together and recognised the importance of the role being held by someone from the peripheries, someone who is Black or Indigenous. From that understanding, we also developed the idea that, regardless of who was selected, it would be essential for that person to be supported by a team of young people.
In practice, I was the person appointed, but many of those who took part in the selection process now work within our mandate or are part of our mandate network. The UN established the role in one way, and we chose to do it differently, because we are in Brazil and we believe in social participation. This approach brings visibility to the Amazon and to all the other biomes of Brazil.
For me, it is an honour and a responsibility, but also a great joy to receive this appointment and to carry out a mandate alongside other young activists from across Brazil, representing all biomes, in order to make this mandate more representative. We use the term mutirão to recognise the many youth-led projects that exist and that protect nature, the environment and ecosystems, but which lack the credentials to bring what is being done on the ground into the international debate. Yet it is precisely what is done on the ground that truly ensures the climate adaptation so often discussed at the international level.
- What makes youth engagement important in the climate action discussions in 2025?
Young people and children are among the groups most affected by the climate crisis. In 2024 alone, a study conducted by UNICEF entitled Learning Interrupted: Global Snapshot of Climate-Related School Disruptions in 2024 revealed that, across 85 countries, at least 242 million students had their schooling disrupted by extreme climate events — such as heatwaves, cyclones, storms, floods and droughts.
In light of this scenario, it is more urgent than ever to include the voices of children, adolescents and young people in climate decision-making processes. After all, these are the groups that are already experiencing — and will continue to experience for longer — the impacts of climate change on their health, education, employment and income.
Across the world, young people are already leading initiatives that bring forward essential and technical debates, such as climate adaptation; environmental racism; the revision of NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions); and the need for financing, culture, inclusion and the effective listening to new generations. Whether through local and regional conferences (such as COYs and LCOYs), engagement in spaces of influence — such as the Youth Working Group of the Environmentalist Parliamentary Front — or through civil society organisations, young people and children are already building solutions.
However, it is not enough for us to be treated as mere decorative figures at events. We need genuine spaces for participation, where our ideas are incorporated into public policies. There are children and young people transforming the world — they simply need to be heard and taken into account in both decision-making and discussion.
- What do you hope young people will take away from COP30?
We need to look with care at our own contexts, our cities and our neighbourhoods. From rivers to seas, we cannot allow ourselves to be isolated by concrete or by the precarious conditions of study, work and existence to which we are subjected. Public policies grounded in climate, racial, economic and gender justice are essential for our generation, and, at the same time, our active participation in shaping these policies is equally necessary.
We must move away from this prevailing culture of destruction and end-of-the-world narratives, and instead channel our creativity and artistic expressions as: (1) strategies to denounce violence, neglect and injustice; and (2) platforms to promote waves of awareness and to combat disinformation. This means fostering a mutirão led by young people — one that goes far beyond simply advancing the climate agenda. It is our time, diverse young people, each in our own way, to say what kind of world we want to live in in the years ahead. My future is greener, with greater appreciation of traditional cultures, more green parks in peripheral communities, and more funding for youth-led projects. I hope we conclude the COP with the Mutirão of Youth taking place in practice.
5. Now the COP is over, and you can reflect back on the COP, and your role, can you identify one of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned?
The greatest lesson of COP30, personally for me, for Marcele and for the world, is the importance of mobilisation led by civil society, Indigenous communities, youth, and by all those who have historically not been inside negotiation rooms. Many of the most significant moments of the two weeks of COP30 were driven by civil society and were directly connected to clear demands within the negotiations, such as the phase-out of fossil fuels, the demarcation of Indigenous lands and climate finance for adaptation.
Although deeply interconnected, these agendas are often framed and understood externally as parallel rather than complementary. COP30 in Brazil left an important lesson: it is not possible to hold a meaningful climate and environmental debate without those who face the crisis daily and build solutions at the local level.
6. What advice would you give the next person that takes on the youth climate champion role?
As a recent and still evolving youth position, it carries the challenge of developing a work plan that leaves a legacy, a working methodology and recognition for the different ways of advocating and demanding accountability within the multilateral system. Having the courage to be creative and the strategic awareness to understand where pressure can be applied is important and makes a difference. However, it is the collective network of young people around the world that is truly tireless. They are the main allies in this construction, and without them, nothing would happen. Working collectively is the key.