By Ebaide Queen Omiunu
On the 29th of January 2026, 507 young Nigerians walked into the National Universities Commission (NUC) Auditorium in Abuja. They came from over 40 secondary schools. Some had travelled hours. None of them had been asked to show up by a government directive or school requirement. They came because they wanted to talk about the climate, and because, for perhaps the first time, someone had built a room specifically for them to do so.
That was the Climate Teen Summit 2026, convened by The Ebaidebheki Initiative (TEI ADVOCACY). It was not a protest. It was not a policy forum filled with grey suits and diplomatic pleasantries. It was something rarer and more urgent: a generation speaking in its own voice about the world it is inheriting, and refusing to be silent about what that inheritance looks like.
I have thought about that room many times since. I thought about it again on June 5, World Environment Day 2026, as the world gathered under the theme “Inspired by Nature. For Climate. For Our Future,” with Azerbaijan hosting the global commemoration in Baku.
The speeches were made. The hashtags trended. The ceremonial tree plantings were photographed and shared. And now, almost two weeks later, the harder question arrives: what happens next? I ask this not cynically. I ask it as someone who has spent years in this space, building programmes, convening young people, advising governments, standing on stages at COP summits, and who has learned that the gap between commemoration and action is where most of Africa’s climate ambition quietly disappears.
The 2026 theme was not accidental. “Inspired by Nature” is a phrase that carries weight precisely because we have spent decades doing the opposite, treating nature as a budget line, a background, an externality to be managed rather than a system to be respected. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was telling us something uncomfortable: that the most sophisticated climate solutions are not always in a laboratory or a finance instrument. Sometimes they are in a mangrove.
Sometimes they are in a seed bank. Sometimes they are in the generational knowledge of a farming community that has read the land for centuries. For Nigeria, a country losing 350,000 hectares of forest every year, watching Lake Chad shrink to a fraction of its former self, seeing coastal communities in Lagos and Delta State swallowed by rising seas, this is not a metaphor. It is a mortality rate. Nature is not sending signals anymore. It is sending emergencies.
Yet even in that reality, I have found reasons for genuine hope, and they are almost always young and Nigerian. The 507 young people at the Climate Teen Summit were not victims of the climate story. They were its analysts. They dissected Nigeria’s NDC commitments. They interrogated why African-led climate solutions are consistently under-resourced compared to imported ones.
They asked with the directness that only the young can sustain, whether the people making decisions about their future had ever actually spoken to them. And then, rather than wait for an answer, they proposed solutions: local, creative, grounded solutions that no consultant’s report had surfaced, because no one had thought to ask them.
Climate action disconnected from economic justice is not climate action; it is performance. That is the conviction behind TEI’s SheLeads Green Jobs Fellowship, Nigeria’s first free green jobs fellowship specifically designed for young women.
Because the women and girls absorbing the worst of Nigeria’s climate shocks, walking further for water as sources dry up, managing food insecurity as harvests fail, rebuilding households after floods, are the same people most excluded from the green economy being constructed in response.
If we are serious about a just transition, it cannot be just in theory. It must be just in practice: in who gets trained, who gets hired, who gets to lead. SheLeads is TEI’s insistence on that practice, a quiet, determined refusal to let the green economy replicate the exclusions of the one it is replacing.
We are now weeks away from the High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) on Sustainable Development in New York, the global stocktaking moment for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Nigeria will send its representatives. Statements will be made. Commitments will be reaffirmed. And then everyone will return home.
What I want, what the young people I work with deserve, is for something different to happen after HLPF 2026. Not more frameworks. Not another decade of pilot projects. What is needed is a fundamental shift in where climate resources flow, whose voices shape climate policy, and what counts as climate leadership.
Africa holds 60 per cent of the world’s remaining arable land. The Congo Basin is the planet’s second lung. Our wetlands, forests, and coastal ecosystems are among the most carbon-rich and biodiverse on Earth. We are not a continent in need of a climate rescue. We are a continent in need of a fair deal, one that recognises that protecting these ecosystems is a global service Africa has been providing for free, and that the world’s climate finance architecture must begin to reflect that reality.
World Environment Day has passed.
The theme told us to be inspired by nature. I am. But I am more inspired by the 507 young Nigerians who filled an auditorium in January, not because someone asked them to, but because they already understood, with a clarity their elders are still catching up to, that the future is not coming. It is already here. And they intend to shape it.
The day has passed. The work has not. Nigeria and the world must act accordingly.
About the Author.
Ebaide Queen Omiunu is the Executive Director and Founding Member of The Ebaidebheki Initiative (TEI), an all-female-led Pan-African NGO focused on climate action, youth leadership, and the SDGs.
She is Principal Adviser at SustainEQ Solutions Ltd, Chair of the African Green Walk 2026, and Secretary of the NBA Climate Justice Committee. She hosts Sustainability Pulse with Ebaide on Aso TV/DSTV and has attended and spoken at various United Nations Climate Change Conferences, UNGA 79 & 80, CSocD63 and CSW69/70. She was recognised by the United Nations as a Face of Sustainable Development and Climate Change in Africa (2024) and by Action Aid as a Top Woman in Climate Change (2025).
– Ebaide Queen Omiunu is the
Executive Director of The Ebaidebheki Initiative (TEI) | Principal Adviser, SustainEQ Solutions Ltd | Chair, African Green Walk 2026
