Obama Scholar fights for youth to lead on climate equity and democracy

A few days into his new job with the Panamanian government, Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez had an epiphany: many of the hard parts of his childhood had the same root cause.

After studying economics at Tulane University, he'd returned to Panama City to work at the Ministry of Environment. His first week, his boss handed him a stack of international climate reports.

"When I went through the reports, I started connecting all the dots," he said. "The recurrent droughts in my community, El Niño, the weather extremes. I was like, 'Holy crap.' My entire life was this thing called climate change. And now I'm here."

Monterrey Gómez is from El Pájaro de Pesé, a small, rural community at the heart of Panama's dry corridor, where he grew up with limited potable water, frequent power outages, and crop failures.

"I didn't even know what climate change was," he said. "As any community member in these spaces, you just go with the flow. You got to survive."

Today, Monterrey Gómez serves as Panama's first Special Envoy for Climate, leading the country's delegations to international negotiations on climate, biodiversity, land degradation, oceans, and plastics. Monterrey Gómez says he aims to cut bureaucracy in national and global environmental governance by increasing collaboration across environmental conventions to prevent policy fragmentation. His work is directly connected to President Obama’s legacy, (Opens in a new tab) which made historic investments in clean energy and protected more acres of public land and water than any other administration in history, leading to the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015.

“The system we built is so cumbersome that while some communities are drowning underwater, a government officer like me is drowning under paper," he said.

His answer is Panama's Nature Pledge (Opens in a new tab) , an initiative that combines five international commitments on climate, biodiversity, land, plastics, and oceans into one unified document. No country had done it before, but Monterrey Gómez says that political will is the key ingredient. This vision was the cornerstone of Panama’s Presidential Government Plan (2024-2029), and some island nations are already asking to replicate it.

"I'm a kid from a small farm in a small town in Panama just trying to cut bureaucracy," he said, "and then suddenly, I'm recognized as a Time 100 (Opens in a new tab) recipient, the second Panamanian in history to be recognized, and the Pope was on that list."

Scholarships and the prayers carried him to boarding school in Missouri, then to Tulane. The rest, he says, was obsessive dedication.

In 2018, Monterrey Gómez was selected as an Obama Scholar at the University of Chicago — one of the youngest in the inaugural cohort.

"All my colleagues were already senior advisors to prime ministers, advisors to Kofi Annan," he shared. "And was just a climate analyst with four years of experience."

He found his footing quickly. "Engaging with religious leaders where the president used to do community organizing and talking with his mentors and his cabinet members — that exposure to people who had actually made it built in me the idea that I could do it," he said. “[The Obama Leadership Network] is a sound board. WIth the network, everything is just easy.”

The Scholar year also incubated ideas he's now enacting. The framework for Panama's Azuero Verde (a green peninsula in Panama) Program first took shape in Chicago, a $50 million initiative that will provide microgrants to small farmers and microloans to mid-size agricultural operations in Panama and is one of the first projects globally to apply market-based instruments to climate adaptation.

Monterrey Gómez is driving Panama’s push to become a global hub for sustainable development, a focus reflected in his portfolio. He led the successful bid to host the Green Climate Fund’s regional office, bringing the world’s largest multilateral climate investor, with a $20 billion portfolio, to Panama. He is now coordinating Panama’s campaign at the United Nations to adopt a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Nature, an initiative that could redefine the legal relationship between humanity and the natural world.

For Monterrey Gómez, hope is not abstract. It is by design.

"People who work at the forefront of climate and nature policy are designing the future," he said. "The opportunity to be the architect of a better world, that's what keeps me going. It's a challenge I love to have."