On the 16th of October 2023, the United Nations (UN) Child Ambassador Maya-Natuk Rohmann Fleischer presented her work in front of a student audience of the M2 Arctic Studies program at UVSQ Paris-Saclay University. At 17 years old, Maya-Natuk has already served two consecutive years in her role promoting children's rights and climate change awareness while highlighting the living conditions of youth in Greenland. Being a native Greenlandic Inuit, she was raised in Greenland and has also lived abroad in Denmark. She has presented in front of and worked with multiple international audiences. Her work ethic and cooperation with the other UN Child Ambassadors stood out as she was highly familiar with the obstacles of her international counterparts.
Maya-Natuk introduced the audience to the events in September 2023 when forest wildfires in Canada produced smoke clouds which fully covered the sky over Greenland for three days. That scary experience showcased how interlinked our planet is and that climate action and protection is a joint global endeavour. She then opened up further about the particular issues Greenlandic Inuit children are confronted with such as unstable parental conditions, risks of exposure to substance abuse and a lack of local professional opportunities and perspectives. Before she took up her office as a UN Child Ambassador, she joined a local youth organisation and through them, and her desire to serve her community and promote awareness of climate change, she became acquainted with the General Comment on Children’s Rights and the Environment with a Special Focus on Climate Change (General Comment No. 26) and was selected as a consultant. While society often sidelines children’s activists as outliers, Maya-Natuk's case makes it evident that children should be put on the centre stage of the local and global climate change debates as they are fully capable of voicing their concerns and hitting the zeitgeist. Maya-Natuk and her peers are leading the climate change discussions and raising awareness of environmental and societal concerns within their communities. They are providing necessary input to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, thus ensuring that the Committee’s official guidance to governments around the globe includes the views of those concerned.