WHO WE ARE

WE STARTED BY PLANTING A 3-METER TREE INSIDE THE BLUE ZONE OF COP27. WE'RE STILL PLANTING THINGS THE SYSTEM SAID WE COULDN'T.

What we do

The Global Youth Coalition is a youth-led network that shows up where decisions are made — UN climate negotiations, financing-for-development tables, biodiversity and ocean conferences — and brings the people most affected by those decisions into the room. We train delegations, fund projects, run research, and build tools so young leaders don't just attend the future. They write it.

How we work

We don't do panels for the sake of panels. Every program ends in a deliverable: a delegation at a COP, a published policy brief, a tree in the ground, a bursary in someone's bank account, a translated report in their language. Our members are scientists, organizers, lawyers, farmers, coders, and artists from 178 countries — and we move at the speed of the crisis, not the speed of the institutions.

What we've moved so far

$350K+ invested into youth-led projects. 5,000 climate solutions mapped through our networks. 60K+ viewers trained through our free programs with partners including the University of Oxford's Net Zero Initiative. Reports translated by volunteers into 6+ languages so the work reaches further than English.

OUR STORY, BY ROOM

COP27

An impossible tree, in the Blue Zone

Sharm El-Sheikh, 2022. A handful of young organizers walked a 3-meter Tree of Hope into the most restricted negotiating space on Earth. No budget, no permission, no precedent. That tree is the reason GYC exists — and the reason we still believe nothing about this system is fixed.

Road to COP28 & COP29

Training a generation in climate finance

Two years on the road, one curriculum: in collaboration with the YOUNGO Climate Finance Academy we trained young negotiators in the language money speaks — loss & damage, the new collective quantified goal, MDB reform — alongside our broader programs with the University of Oxford's Net Zero Initiative that reached 60,000+ viewers worldwide.

COP29

First GYCT delegation, Baku

Baku, 2024. Our first Global Youth Climate Training (GYCT) delegation walked into a COP whose entire fight was finance. Trained, accredited, and prepared to read the text — not just react to it.

2025 — The Finance Year

Following the money — D.C., Davos, Sevilla

If 2024 was the diagnosis, 2025 was the chase. CIF Trust meetings in Washington D.C., collaboration caravans through the Alps to Davos, and our FfD4 side event in Sevilla on intergenerational fairness in financing for development. Wherever the money moved, we moved with it — with a youth seat and a written brief.

UNOC 2025

Ocean diplomacy, Nice

The UN Ocean Conference put the blue half of the planet back on the table. We brought youth voices into the negotiations in Nice — pushing on marine protection, the High Seas Treaty, and the rights of coastal and small-island communities who carry the ocean crisis first.

COP30

Second GYCT delegation, Belém

Belém, 2025. The COP that was always supposed to happen — in the Amazon, on the frontline. Our second GYCT delegation arrived with £3,000 bursaries, we ran Reeforesting 4 Peace in the field, and tied every action back to the communities defending the forest long before any of us showed up.

Today

What we're building next

A permanent youth pipeline into every room that decides our future: the Foresight Research programme, GYC AI Labs, open data through Horizon Scanning, and a network big enough that the next "impossible" tree gets planted without anyone needing permission. If you want in, the door is open.