When Zainab Bie was studying economics at Miranda House, Delhi University, one question kept coming back to her: why do the countries suffering most from the climate crisis get the least financial support to deal with it? That question pulled her out of the classroom and into some of the most consequential policy rooms in the world.
Today, Zainab works with Equal Right, an organisation focused on climate justice and redistribution, advocating for mechanisms that mobilise climate finance and redistribute resources more equitably. She has represented youth and Global South perspectives and advocated for equitable climate finance at COP27 in Egypt, the UN Bonn Climate Conference, COP28 in Dubai, COP29 in Baku, and COP30 in Brazil. She also curates the Impactship Newsletter, which democratises access to climate fellowships, grants, and advocacy opportunities for young people across India and the Global South.
She is in her early twenties. And she is already helping rewrite the terms of the conversation.
Growing Up in Delhi, Growing Into the Crisis
Zainab grew up watching the summers in Delhi change. The heat waves grew longer. Monsoons turned erratic. Air quality warnings started to feel permanent. Climate change was never an abstract headline. It was the weather outside her window.
While studying economics at Miranda House, Delhi University, she kept running into the same question: why do the countries suffering most from the climate crisis receive the least financial support to deal with it? “India has over 1.4 billion people. The needs, for health, education, and poverty eradication, are enormous. And the cost of energy transition falls hardest on workers in mines and factories, on families who depend on those livelihoods. That’s a real human cost,” she says.
The more she read, the clearer something became. Climate change is also an economics and justice problem. “The question isn’t just what the temperature will be in 2050. It’s who pays for the damage already happening, and who gets to decide.”
The Inequality Nobody Talks About Loudly Enough
In conversation with The Logical Indian, Zainab identifies two layers of inequality that define the climate crisis as she has experienced it, one structural and one procedural.
The first is the gap between who causes the crisis and who pays for it. Wealthy, industrialised nations carry the largest share of historical cumulative emissions. But the countries experiencing the worst droughts, floods, cyclones, and food insecurity are often those that contributed the least.
The New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), agreed at COP29 after years of advocacy from developing countries, youth, and civil society, illustrates this tension precisely. “The headline numbers rarely match the scale of actual needs. And much of what gets counted as climate finance is not new and additional, with significant portions still provided as loans rather than grants, meaning vulnerable countries continue taking on debt to address a crisis they didn’t primarily create,” she says.
The second inequality is inside the policy process itself. Climate negotiations are expensive to attend, technically dense, and logistically inaccessible for most young advocates from low-income and developing countries. “If you’re a young advocate from the global south, even getting accreditation to attend a climate negotiation, where our futures are discussed without us, is a logistical and financial challenge most people never overcome.”
The cycle is self-reinforcing: the people most affected by climate change remain least represented where climate policy gets made.
The Distance in the Room
At COP28, Zainab worked with IRENA on renewable energy communications. At COP29 in Baku, she focused on climate finance negotiations around the New Collective Quantified Goal and the Cap and Share model with Equal Right. Across these experiences, one pattern repeated itself.
“The frameworks being debated were written in a language and logic that originated in a very specific part of the world. The Global South perspective, understanding how climate impacts interact with poverty, land rights, food security, and informal economies, often had to fight for space,” she reflects.
She thinks about a farmer in a rain-dependent region whose crop cycles have shifted unpredictably. A daily wage worker in Delhi sitting through 48-degree heat without air conditioning. Fisherfolk along India’s coastline whose livelihoods are shifting because ocean patterns are changing. “The disconnect is about whose mental model of the problem gets to shape the solutions.”
What Real Inclusion Actually Means
Zainab’s argument for representation is not simply moral. It is practical.
“When people who understand ground realities of climate impacts are in the room, the policies that emerge are different. They include local knowledge. They account for context. They’re more likely to actually work,” she says.
She has been in climate spaces with visible representation on panels and in the audience, and watched the conversation still revolve entirely around frameworks and priorities that originated elsewhere. “Real inclusion is when someone from a flood-affected community isn’t just invited to speak about their experience, they’re part of the team designing the policy response.”
Real inclusion also means unrestricted grants to grassroots organisations rather than loans, and participatory grantmaking where communities have a say in how resources are allocated.
Equal Right’s approach reflects this directly. The organisation focuses on unconditional cash transfers, not aid that comes with endless conditionalities or delays, but real, no-strings-attached support that lets communities decide for themselves what they need most, whether that is upgrading a home to withstand extreme heat, diversifying crops after a failed monsoon, or simply keeping food on the table when disaster hits.
Being the Youngest Person in the Room
While speaking to The Logical Indian, Zainab describes what it feels like to walk into rooms where you are clearly the youngest person present, often the only young person, sometimes the only Indian woman.
“There’s a very particular kind of dismissal in those settings. It doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it looks like being talked over. Sometimes it’s someone assuming you’re there to observe, not contribute. Sometimes it’s a question directed to the person next to you instead of you, even when you raise the topic.”
What helped was preparation, and a shift in how she thought about permission. “I also learned you don’t always need permission to take space. Sometimes you simply take it.” Knowing that her perspective was shared by thousands of other young people around the world made it easier to stay in the conversation long enough that her presence stopped being surprising and started being expected.
The Bridge Work
There is a phrase Zainab uses to describe what feels most alive to her: bridge work.
She can sit with a negotiator at a UN climate conference and discuss the technical architecture of the New Collective Quantified Goal. She can also sit with a young person from a small town who has never heard the term “climate finance” and explain why it matters, in language connected to their actual life. “That translation work, carrying ideas and urgency between different worlds, is what feels most alive to me.”
The Impactship Newsletter extends this logic. It curates climate fellowships, grants, job openings, and advocacy opportunities specifically to reach young people in smaller cities and towns across India and the Global South, who have the passion to do this work but simply have not yet found the door.
What She Hopes For
Looking ahead, Zainab wants Equal Right to become a recognised voice on how climate finance actually flows in the Global South, and on the specific reforms that would make it flow more equitably.
She points to the idea of a global carbon budget where countries have proportionate per capita rights, and where those exceeding their carbon share finance a fund that redistributes resources to those who have used less. “It’s a mechanism that turns climate justice from a moral argument into a policy architecture.” Her goal is to see that architecture move from advocacy language into actual negotiating text.
She also wants the Asia-Pacific region represented far more forcefully in global climate finance conversations. The decisions made in the next five to ten years about energy transition, adaptation finance, and climate reparations will shape hundreds of millions of lives here. That scale of consequence deserves a much stronger regional voice in the rooms where those decisions are made.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
At The Logical Indian, we believe that change in India rarely announces itself from the top. It comes from people who refuse to wait for permission, who do the unglamorous work of showing up, learning the language of power, and then using it to open doors for those who come after them.
Zainab Bie’s story is precisely that. In a country where 1.4 billion people stand to be shaped by decisions made in distant negotiating rooms, her work is a reminder that the most important voices in those rooms are often the ones that had to fight hardest to get there. That fight deserves to be seen.
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