Amanda Segnini

Amanda is a climate justice activist and campaigner and the Co-founder of Engajamundo, a youth-led non-profit in Brazil. She is dedicated to increasing understanding about climate change and finding ways to tackle the climate crisis and become part of the solutions for a sustainable future.

Amanda works to inspire youth and civil society to pursue movement in climate change and sustainable development. She has found strategic campaigns to be powerful tools to reach different audiences and amplify initiatives working towards systemic change. She has played a key role in recent successful campaigns in Brazil that have challenged deforestation and land grabbing in the Amazon rainforest.

In 2020, Amanda played a part in Pacto pela Democracia, a Brazilian coalition concerned with the defence of civic space and democracy. Working environmental leaders and NGO directors, she created strategies to prevent and counter setbacks in environmental policy, and organized an advocacy campaign seeking international support from embassies and EU parliamentarians in responding to environmental setbacks in Brazil.

Amanda served as a CIVICUS youth advisor from 2018 to 2019, where she was able to advocate on youth participation in a range of projects, with a particular focus on how civil society finances youth organisations and movements. She collaborated on a CIVICUS publication on resourcing youth organisations, and in 2018 she was a member of the selection team for the first cohort of the Goalkeepers Youth Action Accelerator programme.

In 2012, after Rio+20, she and other young activists co-founded Engajamundo, a network aimed at increasing youth participation in international-decision making processes, and helping young people to play key roles in solving the world’s seemingly intractable problems. Amanda uses capacity-building methodologies that focus on youth-led activism, mobilisation and advocacy, with an intersectional approach to increasing young people’s understanding of issues around the climate emergency. After a youth meeting with more than 100 participants in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, engagement with land protection and indigenous rights became central to the projects she led. She coordinated youth delegations participating in UN-Habitat and UNFCCC international meetings, and in 2015 she was part of the official Brazilian civil society delegation at COP-21.

Amanda has an undergraduate degree in International Relations from PUC-SP and an MSc in Inequalities and Social Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science.