Interview | Climate justice starts where people live

Marcele Oliveira and Mark M. Akrofi call for bottom‑up climate governance, real youth power and fair global responsibility‑sharing in a cross-interview. Both delivered keynote speeches at CEMR, PLATFORMA and UCLG Local Leaders’ Climate Academy last month.

Marcele Oliveira, Executive Director of Perifalab Institute, is a Brazilian climate leader, communicator and cultural producer from Realengo, periphery neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro. At 26, she became the Presidency Youth Climate Champion for COP30, the second person globally to hold this role, created at COP28 to strengthen youth participation in climate governance.

Mark M. Akrofi is a sustainability scientist specialising in energy and environmental policy, sustainability transitions, and Just Energy Transitions. He was a Consultant with the Governance for Climate Change and Sustainable Development Programme at the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS).

How can countries bridge persistent global North–South inequalities while also addressing internal justice gaps, particularly the disconnect between national climate strategies and the realities faced by local communities most exposed to climate impacts?

Mark M. Akrofi: Countries in the Global North have historically contributed more to the emissions responsible for climate change than those in the Global South, yet countries in the Global South suffer the most from climate impacts. Wealthier Global North countries must therefore move beyond commitments to delivering on their climate finance obligations, particularly for adaptation and loss and damage. Mechanisms such as the Green Climate Fund and the recent operationalisation of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage are a step forward, but need to be made more easily accessible to vulnerable countries.

At the national level, there is a need for vertical integration where national climate plans incorporate locally generated data and priorities from local government authorities. A practical example can be found in Kenya, where county-level climate funds allow communities to directly decide how adaptation money is spent, reducing the gap between national commitments and local needs.

How can local and regional governments better integrate cultural practices, heritage, and local knowledge systems into climate action plans, particularly in ways that empower communities, build justice and strengthen resilience?

Marcele Oliveira: In my city, Rio de Janeiro, the mobilisation around the implementation of a green park makes a lot of difference in my relationship with nature. This happens because we protect the things we love and understand, and being disconnected from the environment is the reality of many children and youth around the world. It’s part of our culture, and it’s critical to change this with climate education, mobilisation, and one cultural change.

I just got back from the Global Culture Stocktake at Marrakesh Partnership Accelerator, and we started with a simple but transformative premise: culture is not a complement to climate action. It is a foundational dimension of it.  The Culture Global Stocktake, which just had its first draft published, captures this very well. When the document affirms that the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples, local communities and people of African descent « must be respected, protected and integrated alongside scientific knowledge », it is saying that a climate adaptation plan that does not listen to the territory, its memories, its knowledge, and its practices is already incomplete from the start.

In practice, this means a few concrete things, making engagement between civil society and local governments possible. First: embedding these knowledge systems into formal planning instruments, such as National Adaptation Plans, through genuine participatory processes and not just procedural consultations. Second: recognising cultural infrastructure as resilience infrastructure. The Stocktake is explicit in affirming that cultural centres and community spaces can function as protection hubs during extreme climate events. Third: ensuring direct financing that actually reaches communities, without relying on long chains of intermediaries that have historically excluded them.

With the next IPCC report expected next year, how should governments, cities, and training institutions prepare to use its scientific findings to advance climate justice, especially in terms of strengthening evidence‑based adaptation, improving decision‑making for vulnerable populations, and shaping fair global climate negotiations?

Mark M. Akrofi: The first IPCC report on cities presents a unique opportunity for governments and cities to translate science into actionable policy. I believe the report will produce very rich evidence that will support climate action in cities. Governments and city authorities need to start preparing for how to use these insights, for example, by identifying capacity needs and building them where they lack in order to apply the scientific evidence in practice.

Governments need to prepare for how to connect insights from the report to local systems rather than only national reports. Findings from the report should also inform more equitable negotiations as governments would be able to translate the science into equity arguments and build negotiation positions that connect IPCC evidence to concrete asks on adaptation finance, loss and damage, and capacity support for vulnerable countries.

Gender equality, youth participation and intergenerational justice

Drawing on your experience as a COP30 Youth Climate Champion, what key lessons from the COP process should local and regional governments take on board, and how can they more effectively engage with and influence global climate negotiations?

Marcele Oliveira: I believe the first and most important shift is to subvert the logic that decisions must flow from the global to the local. Simply changing that mindset would already bring a significant transformation in how we understand territories, cities and communities in the climate agenda.

Before anything else, we need to take two steps back and genuinely listen to what already exists at the grassroots level, such as the adaptation technologies, the community-led solutions, and the place-based knowledge that has been built over generations. And from there, carry those voices into decision-making spaces, so that we can continuously find pathways out of the climate crisis we are living through.

COP30 was precisely about that. It was a space where we were able to articulate collective actions that truly centred people. One of the most powerful expressions of this was the « Mutirão das Juventudes », a concept rooted in Brazilian indigenous traditions of collective work and mutual aid, where a community comes together to solve a shared challenge.

The Global Mutirão against Climate Change was a call to action for all sectors of society. In June 2025, the COP30 Action Agenda was launched, bringing together six axes and thirty objectives aimed at accelerating the implementation of climate commitments and ensuring a COP of concrete results. The Mutirão was one of those strategies: mapping projects that emerge from territories, from cities to rural communities, from islands to tropical biomes, and connecting them to the COP30 Action Agenda. It demonstrated something we already knew but needed the world to see: youth are not just future stakeholders. We are essential allies in the implementation of climate solutions, right now.

That is the lesson for local and regional governments. Stop waiting for global frameworks to trickle down. Bring what your territory already knows to the table and demand that global processes be built around it.

How can local and regional governments move beyond symbolic youth engagement to embed young people’s perspectives into decision-making, implementation, and accountability processes in climate governance?

Marcele Oliveira: I think the role of Presidency Youth Climate Champion itself illustrates this very well, and that is exactly the point. We do not want to be called in only for demonstrations or invited to events where we are expected to perform a role. We are not just here to speak about youth, or race, or territory in isolation. We have so much more to bring to the table. We carry scientific and technical knowledge, and a sense of responsibility that was born with us, because our generation already comes into the world knowing, in practice, what climate change means and what it costs.

So what is needed is the creation of real spaces, tools and robust strategies that allow us to genuinely be part of decision-making. Today, even when young people manage to get into these spaces, they still face ageism. We are still looked at as if we are immature. Our voices and our knowledge are still not fully legitimised when it comes to deciding about our own future.

Roles like the PYCC need to exist everywhere. A guaranteed minimum presence of young people, Black people, Indigenous people, and LGBT+ people in governmental mandates and decision-making spaces. Not as tokens, but as decision-makers. Because we bring with us the sensitivity of seeing the world through bodies that have always been pushed to the margins, and from that place, we will create policies for people like us, people who have never been able to benefit from these policies before.

It also means bringing courage, strength and innovation. We are the ones who have spent our entire lives creating strategies to keep existing in a system that constantly tries to erase us. So, we are also the ones who will find a way through the challenge of implementing adaptation policies in the face of the very real threat that the climate crisis brings. We have been adapting to hostile systems our whole lives. Climate governance should learn from that, not the other way around.

What practical approaches can ensure that gender equality, meaningful youth participation, and intergenerational justice are not treated as parallel agendas but are fully integrated into climate transition policies, including emerging areas such as adaptation‑focused city diplomacy?

Mark M. Akrofi: A practical strategy for ensuring gender equality and meaningful youth participation is making these issues integral from the onset of climate action planning. These should not be treated separately but formalised in integrated assessment frameworks for climate action plans. Particularly, adopting gender disaggregated consultations and co-decision mechanisms during consultations will ensure that the voices of different stakeholder groups are taken into account and their needs reflected in programs and policies.

Also, including these gender and youth perspectives as a funding requirement would be useful. For instance, cities receiving climate finance should be required to demonstrate gender-responsive budgeting, youth co-creation mechanisms, and long-term impact evaluations on future generations. Networks such as C40 cities demonstrate climate diplomacy between cities, showing how cities can collaborate across borders. But they can further ensure that youth councils and gender-based organisations are part of these exchanges, not just as observers but as agenda-setters.

Do you want to know more about our Local Leaders’ Climate Academy? Watch the recording of day 1 and day 2.