South Sudan's Young People Are Planting Trees While Their Country's Climate Crisis Deepens

On 5 June 2026, World Environment Day, the United Nations Mission in South Sudan organised a tree-planting and clean-up event at One Primary School in Juba. Peacekeepers and students planted trees together. A 17-year-old student named Princess Juliana, who leads a school environmental group called the Nature Club, spoke about the connection between environmental protection and personal wellbeing. A student named Yakubo Deng described the environment as "the foundation for all life."

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The event was a small one. It planted some trees, cleaned some grounds, and allowed students to speak publicly about what they value. By the metrics applied to United Nations peacekeeping mission environmental programming, it is unremarkable.

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What makes it worth examining is the context in which it took place. South Sudan is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world. It is also one of the most politically fragile, having emerged from a civil war that killed an estimated 400,000 people between 2013 and 2018 and that has left the state with minimal capacity, deeply divided institutions, and an economy dependent on oil revenues that have been disrupted by conflict and infrastructure collapse.

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The climate dimension of South Sudan's crisis has intensified over the past decade. Flooding along the Nile and its tributaries has reached historic levels in multiple recent years, displacing millions of people who were already displaced or vulnerable from conflict. The flooding is not only a humanitarian emergency — it destroys crops, contaminates water sources, blocks the supply routes that relief organisations use to reach populations, and drives livestock deaths that collapse the livelihood base of pastoralist communities. At the same time, South Sudan experiences prolonged droughts in other regions, concentrating population pressure on the areas that remain livable.

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The interaction between climate shocks and conflict is not linear but mutually reinforcing. Flooding and drought both drive competition over land, water, and pasture, providing material conditions for violence in communities where cattle raiding, ethnic hostility, and political manipulation have long histories. Climate does not cause conflict in South Sudan, but it is now a consistent accelerant.

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UNMISS's mandate includes protection of civilians, support for the implementation of the peace process, and monitoring of the human rights situation. Environmental programming is a marginal part of its work — a soft-power activity that occupies a small fraction of mission resources. The tree-planting event is not an environmental policy intervention. It is a community engagement exercise with educational value.

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What the event produced, however, was something worth noting: young people in a primary school in Juba expressing, in their own language, an understanding of the relationship between environmental protection and human welfare. Princess Juliana said that taking care of the environment means taking care of ourselves. Her teacher said the event was about planting hope. These are not the statements of people who have been told what to say. They are the statements of people who live in a country where the consequences of environmental collapse are visible, present, and personal.

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The head of UNMISS's environment programme noted that students are "eager to make their own contributions to protecting the world they live in." That eagerness is a form of social capital. Whether South Sudan's political leadership, its international partners, and the climate finance architecture treat it as relevant is a different question. South Sudan received less than one per cent of the global climate finance disbursed in 2024, despite being among the most severely affected countries. The gap between the urgency expressed by a 17-year-old in Juba and the allocation of resources to address what she is describing is one of the defining contradictions of the current international climate response.