From collecting coins for UNICEF as a child to joining its Climate Education Advisory Group, this is a full-circle moment.
UNICEF is launching a Climate Education Advisory Group to support the Leading Minds Climate Education Fellowship, strengthening its governance, learning journey, and system-level impact through intergenerational leadership.
The Climate Education Advisory Group brings together global leaders in climate education, child rights, youth movements, research, and systems change. The Group will accompany the Fellowship from early design through implementation, evidence-building, and policy influence, ensuring that youth leadership is meaningfully embedded in institutional processes.
The UNICEF Leading Minds Climate Education Fellowship is a youth-centred initiative designed to strengthen global understanding of what works in climate education. The Fellowship focuses on building a robust evidence base through youth-driven research, foresight, and strategic convening, surfacing the system-level levers across education, governance, finance, and communities that enable transformative climate learning.
By formally establishing a Climate Education Advisory Group for the first time, UNICEF is reinforcing the Fellowship’s ambition to connect youth-led innovation with global policy, education systems, and long-term change, through intergenerational governance in practice.
“I am honoured to join the UNICEF Innocenti Climate Education Advisory Group and to have the opportunity to contribute to its vital work for children and young people at this crucial moment,” said Andrea Koehle Jones, Children’s Environmental Education Advocate, Author, and Climate Journalist. “Today, education systems are still failing to prepare young people for the climate crisis, leaving more than one billion children at extreme risk.”
Inclusive and transformative climate education empowers children and youth to understand the climate crisis, respond to it, and lead solutions. It nurtures knowledge, skills, values, and agency across both formal and informal learning spaces.
Building on its history of protecting children, UNICEF is uniquely positioned to prepare and protect children from the climate emergency by advancing climate education as both a fundamental right, as outlined in General Comment No. 26, and a catalyst for systemic change.
The UNICEF Leading Minds Climate Education Fellowship prioritizes the safe, meaningful, and inclusive participation of children and young people in decision-making processes at every level. Echoing this commitment, Koehle Jones said, ‘There is nothing I wouldn’t do to help safeguard and prepare children for the challenges of an ever-changing world.’
The Advisory Group brings together global leaders in climate education, child rights, youth movements, research, and systems change. It will accompany the Fellowship from design through implementation, evidence-building, and policy influence. I’m honoured to serve alongside Bo Viktor Nylund, Temilade Salami, Hikaru Hayakawa, Catarina Lorenzo, David Wilgenbus, and Philip D. Jaffé.
“From collecting coins for UNICEF as a child and dreaming of one day working with the world’s farthest-reaching humanitarian organization for children, this opportunity to join UNICEF’s Climate Education Advisory Group represents a full-circle moment. I am deeply honoured and look forward to working with the team to support young climate changemakers in reimagining climate education so that every child, everywhere, can fall in love with nature, grow up prepared and empowered to protect it, and help shape a just and sustainable future.” — Andrea Koehle Jones, Climate Education Advisory Group member.
Apply to the UNICEF #LeadingMinds Fellowship on Climate Education by Jan 6, 2026, here: https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/leading-minds-fellowship-climate-education
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