Nominated By: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Co-Founder of Urban Ocean Lab, marine biologist, policy expert
Age: 27
Based in: Los Angeles (Currently in the Hague, Netherlands, working at the International Court of Justice)
Ayisha Siddiqa is a J.D. candidate at UCLA School of Law, where she specializes in human rights and international environmental law. She is the founder and executive director of the Future Generations Tribunal, focused on documenting the impact of the climate crisis for legal and political actions. She has also served as an advisor to the UN Secretary-General on human rights, and as a special advisor to the UN Youth Envoy. Siddiqa is a commissioner on the International Energy Agency’s Global Commission on People-Centered Clean Energy Transitions and serves on the boards of Planetary Guardians.
“Ayisha Siddiqa is remarkable. She’s a climate activist and law school student, climate advisor to the UN Secretary General, and a leader of the Future Generations Tribunal, working to ensure that youth are shaping how we address our environmental crises. I first met Ayisha when she was a youth organizer, co-leading the Global Climate Strike in 2019 that brought around 300,000 people to the streets of NYC. I deeply appreciate the heart she brings to climate work, capturing the human urgency of the climate crisis and deliberately framing it as a justice issue, one that jeopardizes the futures of young people and those yet to be born. Ayisha’s work to create a global framework for the rights of future generations has the potential to be transformational.” —Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: What inspired you to pursue a legal education?
Ayisha Siddiqa: I grew up in a tribal community in Pakistan, where my people not only did not have access to clean water, healthcare, and education, we had no access to a legal system that would recognize our autonomy or rights. I attained my formative education in the same school building as my mother and her father before her. It was a small, self-run community school, built by and for our tribe, and the distance between those four walls and a J.D. in the United States is not one that can be measured in miles alone. I am the first woman in my family ever to pursue a legal career, let alone an international one. And I’m doing it so that I, as an indigenous person, can understand the rules and regulations that dictate our world and help my people, and indigenous people all over the world, to have a fighting chance for our rights. I also deeply believe in indigenous systems of living that think beyond the rights of property and accumulation but give dignity to the more than human, to the next seven generations.
Johnson: What is your dream for the Future Generations Tribunal, the nonprofit you founded?
Siddiqa: The idea is actually profoundly simple: that no government, no institution, no corporation operates in a way that harms the children, in a way that harms the generations of human and non-human that will inherit the earth. The rights of future generations, interestingly enough, is not about some abstract entities that will exist 300 years from now—it is about measuring the harm that people and children alive today are already experiencing, and saying these harms cannot continue. In fact, given that the climate crisis is only getting worse, we need stronger and more anticipatory protection mechanisms for those who will have to live through what is coming.
What we are really asking is a question that legal systems have largely avoided: what do we owe to those who will inherit this planet? And we are not asking it from the comfort of an Ivy League classroom. We are asking it in communities across the world to people living the harms of the climate crisis. At the end of 2024, we co-convened the People’s Assembly alongside the historic ICJ climate advisory proceedings in the Hague, gathering frontline activists, Indigenous leaders, and climate-affected communities from across the world. Their testimonies were compiled into a 104-page People’s Petition, the only citizens’ submission entered into the court, standing alongside those from over 90 states. Ordinary people’s voices entered the highest court in the world. That, to me, is what the Tribunal is for.
We have since held a tribunal in Kenya, collecting testimonies from East African communities facing drought, displacement, and devastating loss. We are building an archive of lived experience that has legal weight.
Johnson: You’re also a poet. How does your creative spirit show up in your climate work?
Siddiqa: My mother often jokes that the tempest spirit of my late grandmother lives in me. That is where I get my poetry from: many, many years of oral storytelling. In truth I am a poet before I am anything else, because through literature and song is how I’ve learned to make sense of the world. Poetry actually carves a path of meaning in a sea of overwhelming information. It’s not about some climate crisis. It’s about that beekeeper in southern Kenya whose tongue hasn’t tasted the sweetness of honey in three seasons because the bees don’t come around anymore. It’s not necessarily about sea level rise. It’s about that mother from Vanuatu who doesn’t know if the grave her son is buried in will exist in 10 to 15 years, and so she visits as often as humanly possible, but the waves are getting closer to tombstone where she leaves lilies. It’s not necessarily about global warming.
It’s about a 6-year-old schoolgirl in northern Pakistan who has ironed and laid out her uniform all by herself the night before, whose father has been working long hours in the scorching sun to save up for her school tuition. But he is committed to educating her because he doesn’t have any sons, and he wants her to be able to live for herself one day. And then on the first day of school she wakes up and is told that school is closed for the next foreseeable future because it’s so incredibly hot that her classmates are passing out on their way to school. That is the true reality of the climate crisis in my opinion. That, heartbreakingly enough, is poetry at a time where the world is collapsing in on us.
Johnson: What are the top three things you wish everyone knew about climate/climate solutions?
Siddiqa: If we are really serious about solving the climate crisis, we need a true reform of our economic models. We need to create strategies that value nature and place resources in the hands of the people protecting it.
I work very closely with Professor Johan Rockström in advancing planetary boundaries science through the Planetary Guardians. We have now breached seven of the nine planetary boundaries, ocean acidification being the most recent, confirmed in the 2025 Planetary Health Check. The incredible work that Professor Rockström is doing is trying to map out how we can come back into safe zones after these boundaries have been breached, the answer is concerted multilateral effort; we need the states and the citizens.
Third, and I will admit my bias here, the climate crisis is also a crisis of reacting once it is already too late. We have built legal and economic systems that cannot reckon with a simple truth: future generations will inherit a dying planet, and until we establish that it is a violation of their rights to pass that dying planet on to them, nothing will fundamentally change. Until intergenerational equity has binding, enforceable teeth, we will keep making decisions today that mortgage the future. The rights-based framework my colleagues and I are developing is our attempt to give it exactly that.
Johnson: If you could snap your fingers and eliminate one barrier to achieving climate justice, what would it be?
Siddiqa: The world’s highest court and many scientists often refer to the climate crisis as an existential threat, one that relentlessly has found its way into every aspect of humanity’s existence. And given this question is about climate justice and not the reduction of carbon, my answer would be that our legal system reform in a way that we can hold those that are breaching the boundaries of our planet, those that are securing an unlivable world for future generations, accountable.
EVs are not going to solve the climate injustice, going vegan is not going to solve the issue of climate injustice, buying sustainably won’t solve the issue of climate injustice, because the issue is rooted deeply within economic models and the legal frameworks that uphold them. A corporation’s main priority cannot be its shareholders exclusively; its shareholder has to be the planet. The law’s impartial judgment was never meant to simply preserve the order that exists, it was meant to protect what sustains us. And what sustains us is the planet.
This feature is part of CULTURED’s 2026 Young Activists list, spotlighting those around the country working to champion the causes closest to them. Each is nominated and interviewed by a leader in their field. You can read their features here.
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