Name: Hafiz Jawad Sohail
Country: Pakistan
Gender: Male
Age: 25 – 29 years old
Courses completed: Intro Course on Climate Change and Cities and Climate Change
Story ID: 330
Story
After I graduated from university, I decided to learn more about nature and therefore enrolled myself in some online courses from UNCC:Learn. After taking some self-paced courses, I was touched by climate change science and how it was connected with my geoscience background. It was not difficult for me to understand the climate crisis because it was very close to what I had already studied, and rather at once convinced me in advocating for the climate crisis that everyone is facing nowadays.
It was also the start of my learning about the Sustainable Development Goals and the Agenda 2030. I embarked on this journey that day and today, I am lucky enough to have left behind the fossil fuel career as a petroleum geologist and have successfully transitioned into the green sector after a long struggle period.
I have accomplished many acts of leadership including contacting and meeting influencers, organizing and participating in global climate events, writing on climate crisis, and direct public outreach. From attending COP26 in-person to contributing as a resource speaker in SDGs bootcamp in the Philippines and mentoring climate reality leaders to organizing national level events, I got the chance to work on all tiers of climate action; global, regional and local. I have advocated for the essential role of youth in policy making around climate action before the National Assembly Standing Committee of Govt. of Pakistan. My crown achievement is organizing Pakistan’s First Ever National Dialogues on SDGs in March 2022, which resulted in a mass scale awareness among institutions. This event was the first-of-its-kind in Pakistan, based on quintuple helix model, in which public-private-academic-media-CS organizations collaborated to bring all stakeholders on a unified platform to talk about SDGs progress, by leveraging upon the collective wisdom to chalk out strategy to deliver the national commitment on Agenda 2030.
Having outstanding exposure and linkages in the area of SDGs, climate change and networking, I am now associated with UN SDSN as Project Officer, climate ambassador with World Bank’s Y2Y community – GYCN and a member of YOUNGO (official youth constituency of UNFCCC). As the country coordinator to the COY16 (The 16th UN Climate Change Conference of Youth), I worked on collecting the input from youth all across the country that was put together with global youth statement that served as policy statement and was submitted to the COP26 Presidency for their consideration as they went into negotiation process. Due to my work, I was invited to represent the Youth Constituency of the UNFCCC at COP26 in Glasgow. In my professional role as Senior Project Officer in WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature Pakistan), my role revolves around climate and water, nature-based solutions and environmental conservation interventions. All thanks to these free courses, I embarked on this journey and today I feel I am qualified enough to engage in discussions on climate change.
Does your story also contribute to gender equality?
As a young leader, I have always facilitated the participation and role of women in climate. I have trained many women when I mentored Climate Reality Leadership Corps of The Climate Reality Project and organized several workshops for women when working in SDGs Academy Pakistan.