Nisreen Elsaim is a Sudanese activist committed to bringing climate issues to public discourse and management. She sits as the Chair of the United Nations Secretary General’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change, Climate, and Security.
In this role, Elsaim intervenes in the largest panels bringing together heads of state, ministers, UN officials that are far older than her. Regardless, she stands out for her positions on the urgent issue of climate change.
Elsaim holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in renewable energy from the University of Khartoum. She became actively involved in sustainable development in 2012. In fact, her country, Sudan, is ranked as one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change and is experiencing several harms of climate change, including increased frequency of droughts, high variability of rainfall that jeopardizes agriculture and livelihoods for grazing. These include increased frequency of droughts, high variability of rainfall that threatens agriculture and grazing livelihoods, and health problems related to pollution, disease outbreaks, overexploitation of land and water, and food insecurity.
The 26-year-old activist is a member of the Youth Environment Sudan (YES), an organization gathering the action of more than a thousand environmental associations in Sudan and of which she is now the coordinator in Sudan.
She is also an active member of the Pan-African Alliance for Climate Justice, a consortium of more than 1,000 organizations from 48 African countries that work together to address climate issues and environmental challenges facing humanity and the planet.
In recognition of her distinguished commitment to making a change to the world, she was in 2019 named as one of the 30 UN Youth Special Envoys. That same year, she organized the Youth Climate Summit.
In 2020, the Africa Youth Awards named her one of the top 100 most influential young people in the world.
