Youth perspectives: How intergenerational action speeds up climate progress

When Marcele Oliveira was taking the bus from her neighbourhood in Brazil to university, she noticed the stark absence of trees and green spaces around her home.

She quickly connected what she saw as "environmental racism" to broader patterns of climate injustice occurring around the world.

It spurred her on to campaign for the creation of Parque Realengo Susana Naspolini on the site of a former Army munitions factory. The park, with its signature conical metal towers, was opened in June 2024.

In April 2025, Oliveira was appointed as the Youth Champion for COP30 by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

"As a young black woman coming from the Global South, climate justice is more urgent. It's not a conversation about solidarity or empathy, it's a conversation about our lives," she says.

Oliveira is one of many young climate leaders coming together with older generations to make a difference.

As part of its Global Shapers Annual Summit (GSAS25) in Geneva in July, the World Economic Forum brought together an all-woman round table for a session called Next Generation Now: Igniting Intergenerational Climate Leadership.

Oliveira joined Lindsey Prowse, the Forum's Lead for North America & Youth Engagement, 1t.org, and ecopreneur Lorena James, in the session chaired by Gill Einhorn, Head of 1t.org, to discuss how cross-generational partnerships drive innovative climate solutions ahead of COP30.

Here are some of their key takeaways.

"Every generation has something of value to offer to each other," said Prowse. "When we're facing hard realities ahead, enabling spaces to collaborate more effectively across age, experience and time-horizons can benefit corporate climate strategy and policy, as well as younger generations who are set to inherit many of the consequences of these decisions that have an impact on their future."

Research shows this already working in practice.

"In the boardrooms of the private sector, if you introduce one younger leader to that decision-making space, the company's CSR outcomes can improve up to 15%, so that's a big win."

But the concept of cross-generational leadership and collaboration is still largely underutilized, especially in conventional leadership models, according to Prowse.

"Where decisions are being made on climate and capital and resources, they're not benefiting from younger perspectives and younger generations, which bring a unique set of values and perspectives and skill sets.

"So we have this challenge ahead of us where conventional decision-making spaces often equate leadership with years of experience, but intergenerational leadership is a tool that we can use to reimagine how we make more effective decisions and scale more effective action for nature and climate by collaborating across generations and geographies to get us there. Part of the work that we're doing is really to articulate the benefits to our private sector partners."

"We have the solutions for this. We have people defending nature and defending the climate and facing the consequences of climate change for decisions they don't make," said Oliveira.

"Collective action has different contexts, different ages and perspectives, but it's everybody together. For COP30, the mandate is to engage children, youth and families and the cultural sector as well as the people trying to understand ways to survive in the conditions we have - with the heatwaves, the food.

"We are also trying to provide climate education for the children, and be inside the conversations at the local level. We are talking about the traditional knowledge coming from the indigenous communities.

"All this is on the table because we are in COP30 - it's been 30 years and this model hasn't solved the problem, but the system, the Paris Agreement, the conversation about adaptation, about implementation, is really important."

"I am an optimist in this work. I feel it's impossible not be one as an environmental leader, but optimism can tend to fade with age," said James, who has founded a company that upcycles materials from invasive species.

"A lot of the benefit I've seen of joining teams of older folks is having the optimism, the drive to know that we can make a change in this world.

"As an ecopreneur working the invasive species space, we are encouraging this paradigm shift. Invasive species are bad for the environment, but they have often native and culturally significant uses in their home countries."

For example, both kudzu, known as 'the vine that ate the South' in the US, and water caltrop are native to China. When James attended the Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin in June, she ate a dish that included caltrop.

"I was thinking, what if we were able to take this method of cooking water caltrop and utilize that to help decrease the population of water caltrop that's invasive in the Great Lakes region?

"If I share this idea with an older non-profit leader, for example, in Charlotte, North Carolina, or in Buffalo, New York, initially, they're thinking, 'Why would we do that?' These invasive species are so bad for the environment, they can't possibly have any good. But when I explain the process of removing the invasive plant from ecosystems and processing it in a responsible way to make sure that we're not spreading that invasive species further, they're like, 'That makes perfect sense'.

"It's that education part that's really important in what we do, and having that energy as a Gen Z person really helps us get a lot of work done."

Watch the session in full below.