It is a fair question: what does a regional youth conference in Nizwa have to do with a UN climate negotiation in Antalya?
The answer is the pipeline. RCOY — the Regional Conference of Youth — is the regional layer of a process that ends at the Conference of the Parties. Every region runs its own RCOY. Those regional statements are then merged at COY, the Conference of Youth, held immediately before the COP, into a single Global Youth Statement handed to the COP Presidency.
The dates that matter
- 16–19 September 2026 — RCOY MENA, Nizwa, Sultanate of Oman.
- Early November 2026 — COY21, where regional statements are merged.
- 9–20 November 2026 — COP31, Antalya, Türkiye.
Why the regional step is not a formality
A global statement written without regional input tends to average everyone into nobody. Water scarcity in Jordan, displacement across the Levant, the labour-market side of a transition in North Africa, finance that never reaches fragile states — these are specific, and they only survive into the global text if a region puts them there in words that can be negotiated.
That is the work of the four days in Nizwa.