I still remember the strange mix of nerves and disbelief boarding a plane to Sharm El Sheikh in November 2022. A few months earlier I’d been sitting in my school lecture hall wondering if engineering was even mine to keep fighting for. Now I was on my way to COY17, the Conference of Youth, about to spend three days in rooms full of young people from every corner of the world who had somehow all arrived at the same conviction: that climate change was the fight of our generation, and that we weren’t going to wait for permission to be part of it.
COY started in 2005, when a handful of young people decided they weren’t willing to sit outside the room while the adults negotiated the planet’s future. It’s grown since then into something bigger: an annual gathering under YOUNGO, the youth constituency of the UN climate process, held just ahead of COP itself. The idea is simple and, I think, a little radical. Give young people the knowledge and the room to actually lead on climate, instead of just being invited to watch.
I didn’t fully understand what I was walking into until I was standing in the middle of it. Three days, and every hour of them packed with people who talked about climate justice the way I’d talked about probability laws two years earlier: like it was the thing that finally made sense of everything else. I remember sitting in on a session and looking around the room, doing the quiet math of how many countries were represented in just that one space, and feeling something between overwhelmed and completely alive.
What I hadn’t expected was how much I’d end up wanting to contribute, not just absorb. I came to COY17 carrying something I actually cared about explaining: Morocco’s green hydrogen story. It’s easy to talk about climate change only in terms of what’s going wrong, and there’s no shortage of reasons to. But sitting across from delegates from countries with far more resources than mine, I wanted to make the case that Morocco wasn’t just a country living with the consequences of a crisis it didn’t cause.
It was one of the countries actually building a way out. Morocco set up its National Hydrogen Commission back in 2019, years before green hydrogen became the term everyone in these rooms now throws around, and has since built out a real roadmap for it: a fuel that burns clean, storable in more than one form, useful across transport, power, and industry. I’d read the reports before I left. Saying it out loud to a room of skeptical, sharp, engaged strangers was a different thing entirely, and I found I actually enjoyed defending it.
That’s the part I keep coming back to when I think about COY17. Not the panels, not even the policy detail, but the fact that I sat in rooms with people from a hundred and forty other countries and didn’t feel like I needed to shrink to fit. I’d spent the previous year feeling like a square peg in my own engineering program. Here, for three days, I got to find out what it felt like to actually belong somewhere I’d had to fight to get into, instead of just enduring it.
I left Sharm El Sheikh with a longer list of things I still don’t know how to fix than I arrived with, and I think that’s the honest way to describe most of what happens at a conference like this. Climate justice isn’t a problem with a tidy solution sitting at the end of three days of talks. It needs governments and businesses in the room, yes, but it also needs the people who are usually left out of that room: civil society, indigenous communities, women, and young people like the ones I met that week, who won’t inherit this crisis quietly.
I came back different, not because I’d found some grand answer, but because I’d gotten a clear glimpse of the kind of rooms I wanted to keep finding my way into. I was still figuring out what to do with an engineering degree that no longer felt like mine. But I now knew, with more certainty than before, that whatever came next had to leave room for this too: showing up, representing something bigger than myself, and trusting that I belonged at the table even before I felt entirely sure of it.