Youth-Led Insights: Co-creating a Just and Inclusive Energy Future (COP30)

In a time of rapid change and uncertainty, ensuring a just and inclusive energy transition has never been more urgent. This session brings together youth leaders and senior policymakers to exchange ideas on how to expand access to affordable clean energy, create quality jobs, and build the skills needed for a low-carbon, climate-resilient future.

An interactive fireside chat will spotlight innovative approaches to renewable deployment, workforce development, and education reform that empower young people to shape the transition. The discussion will also highlight the role of youth organizations as bridges between generations and institutions, and as catalysts for people-centred energy policies that leave no one behind. 

Summary of insights 

NRGI’s Melissa Marengo reflected on how the green and digital transitions can better serve young people, women, and communities most affected by energy injustice. Her responses emphasized the need for systemic shifts in education, governance, and territorial justice to ensure that the energy transition is truly inclusive and equitable.

Moderator: How can we ensure that the green and digital transitions create inclusive and equitable opportunities, particularly for young people, women, and communities most affected by energy injustice? Where are we falling short, and what needs to change?

Melissa:

Right now, many policies and investments still overlook women, youth, and frontline communities. To correct this, we must:

• Evolve education systems in regions historically dependent on extractive industries to include renewable energy, environmental sciences, innovation, and social transformation. This opens new career pathways and equips young people with the skills needed for a sustainable future.
• Recognize AI as an opportunity for youth. Young people adapt quickly to new technologies and can use AI to innovate in renewable energy, environmental monitoring and beyond if given access and training.
• Ensure transitions are territorially just, meaning the communities most affected by extraction or pollution should be the first to benefit from renewable energy investments, not displaced by them.
• Decentralize decision-making, allowing local voices to actively shape transition plans.
• Remember that a just transition is ultimately about redistributing power, expanding opportunity, and recognizing those who have paid the highest price for the fossil-fuel economy.

Moderator: What solutions can integrate social fairness into regional and global energy transitions? And what future solutions might we not yet be thinking about?

Melissa:

A socially fair transition requires system-wide changes:

• Responsible fossil fuel exit: In fossil-fuel-dependent regions, education systems must introduce pathways linked to hydrocarbon project closure, environmental remediation, and ecosystem restoration, fields that will expand as countries phase out fossil fuels.
• Closing expertise gaps: For example, in Peru, several abandonment plans have been under evaluation for up to six years due to limited technical capacity. Building local expertise is essential.
• Strengthening governance frameworks: Human rights, transparency, and benefit-sharing should be core criteria in all transition-related investments. We must link mineral governance, renewable energy development, and fiscal systems to measurable social outcomes.

These steps ensure that the transition doesn’t simply clean the energy mix—it transforms opportunities and strengthens equity.

Moderator: What urgent actions are needed to align education and workforce development with the needs of the clean energy transition? Who should lead this coordination?

Melissa:

We need to anticipate, not react to, emerging transition skills:

• Redesign education and workforce systems to prepare young people for clean energy jobs before demand fully emerges.
• Integrate training on renewable energy technologies, environmental governance, circular economy, and social dialogue in both academic and technical programs. This ensures the workforce is technically skilled and socially and environmentally conscious.
• Shared leadership is essential: Governments should set national strategies, but coordination must involve local authorities, universities, industry, and civil society to ensure training reflects local realities.
• Financing matters: Funding for upskilling, retraining, and education, especially for women, youth, and workers in declining sectors, must be built into national transition plans from the outset.