Ocean Policy · Sea-Level Rise

A Miami Teenager Reports From the UN General Assembly’s High-Level Meeting on Sea-Level Rise

Alexa Charouhis, 17, was in the room in New York on 24 September when world leaders approved the first UN declaration on sea-level rise. She writes about what she heard, what it meant for her hometown, and what her generation is already doing about it.

By Alexa Charouhis | Guest Contributor | New York, 24 September 2026

Shifting uncomfortably in one of the four hard wooden seats reserved for invited observers at the United Nations General Assembly’s high-level plenary on sea-level rise, I ponder my purpose.

World leaders convened this week for the Assembly’s High-level Plenary Meeting to Address the Existential Threats Posed by Sea-level Rise, held on 24 September during the 81st session. It may be one of our best chances to act for the future of this planet.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres opened the meeting with a number from his own report: global sea levels rose by almost six millimetres in 2024, the largest annual increase ever recorded.

Khalilur Rahman of Bangladesh, President of the General Assembly’s 81st session, followed. The statistic that stayed with me from the meeting was that more than one billion people could face coastal hazards by 2050.

Surangel Whipps Jr., the President of Palau, spoke next on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States, pleading for action for island nations that face being erased altogether as the seas keep rising.

Then Shisir Khanal, Nepal’s foreign minister, described last month’s “Himalayan tsunami”, when a mountainside of ice and rock collapsed on 26 August and sent a flood through Nepal’s valleys. More than 1,300 people were killed and over 5,000 remain missing, according to the Associated Press, and a World Weather Attribution analysis found that glaciers thinned by warming and thawed permafrost likely helped destabilise the slope. As we sat safely inside UN headquarters, the search for the missing was still going on halfway across the world.

Listening to Guterres warn that greenhouse gases “are cooking our planet”, I think about my hometown. Much of Miami’s coastal infrastructure sits low, and the homes of millions of people in Miami-Dade County sit with it. Heavy rain already floods streets across South Florida, and each storm puts more strain on an ageing flood-control system that was never designed for today’s rainfall or today’s seas.

And yet, amid the frightening statistics and heartbreaking testimony, something else was in the room that day. Solutions.

A declaration, and a mangrove

Member states approved the UN Declaration on Sea Level Rise by consensus. It commits governments to stronger international cooperation and more predictable financing for the communities most threatened by rising seas. It also sets out a presumption that a state continues to exist, and keeps its maritime zones, even if its coastline disappears under the sea.

Alongside the plenary, I shared my own small solutions. We Are Forces of Nature is carrying forward A Million Mangroves, the initiative my brother Will started, with the aim of getting one million mangroves in the ground by 2030. More than 140 young people are now involved, from Virginia to Peru to Gabon. Mangroves are among the best natural defences we have against rising seas. They shield coasts and infrastructure from storm surge, and they absorb the atmospheric carbon that heats our ocean, melts our glaciers and swells our seas.

What hope looks like

I am 17. I understand the enormity of the crisis. And I know that hope does not mean waiting for someone else to shoulder the responsibility.

Hope means a flood warning sent before the water rises. A community rebuilt more safely. An emissions cut that keeps another fraction of a degree out of the atmosphere. A mangrove planted in the mud. And young people willing to put the solutions into practice ourselves.

As I left the UN, I thought about the flags of the 193 member states behind me. The ocean does not recognise those borders. Neither does climate change, and neither should our response.

Declarations matter. But what happens after we leave this building matters more.

Alexa Charouhis

The water is rising, and the floods are already here. My generation is not asking for a seat at the table any more. We are already in the room, and it is our right, and our responsibility, to decide what happens next.

UN News has published a summary of the UN Declaration on Sea Level Rise and the meeting.

About the author

Alexa Charouhis is a 17-year-old climate activist from Miami and president of We Are Forces of Nature, a youth-led organisation that describes itself as one of the youngest accredited by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Environment Programme. She also leads Fashions Forward, which works to bring fashion back into the circular economy and supports secondary education in under-resourced coastal communities hit hardest by climate change.

About SEVENSEAS

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