The Climate Ambition Summit kicks off today at the United Nations headquarters in New York, to coincide with the annual meeting of world leaders for the opening of the General Assembly.
Limerick-born teenager Saoirse Exton is there as a member of the Youth Advisory Group to UN Secretary-General António Guterres on climate change.
"It's a huge honour to represent my country and the organisations that I’m involved in," she told RTÉ News.
"I think young people are often tokenised in these spaces and so it’s really important to have a role that has the potential to ingrain young people in decision-making processes," she said.
Ms Exton, 18, recently sat her Leaving Cert exams and has been a climate activist since she was 13.
She is a member of Fridays for Future, the global school strike movement started by the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.
Last weekend in New York, Ms Exton joined the "March to End Fossil Fuels" in which tens of thousands of climate protestors took to the streets ahead of UN General Assembly week, calling for a ban on coal and oil extraction.
"We're angry and we're ready for change," Ms Exton told RTÉ News just before the march got under way.
Her words chime with those of the Secretary-General whose rhetoric on climate change has become increasingly heated in recent months.
At the opening session of the General Assembly yesterday, Mr Guterres told delegates that the world had just survived the hottest days, hottest months, and hottest summer on the books.
"Behind every broken record are broken economies, broken lives and whole nations at the breaking point," he told the Assembly.
But are people listening?
"People do care and are listening. You can tell by the number of people who are here, and the march hasn’t even begun," Ms Exton told RTÉ News.
"It’s just a matter of how we get member states to actually change their behaviour," she told RTÉ News as protestors carrying cardboard placards gathered.
Moments later, Ms Exton had found her way through the crowds to the front of the youth group, holding a banner emblazoned with the words, "youth didn’t vote for fossil fuels".
Into a megaphone, she chanted: "The people united will never be defeated."
Asked by RTÉ News if she ever feels disheartened, she said that she would never give up.
"We're never going to let the climate crisis go. We will keep fighting for every last thing that we have to fight for," she said.
