Ralien Bekkers ’16 MEM was campaigning on climate change before she was old enough to vote. As a high school student in the Netherlands, she watched Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in class, and it stopped her cold.
“Why don’t I know about this?” she said to herself. “Why isn’t anyone talking about this? Why aren’t we all working on this?”
She started looking for answers — and ways to act. She joined the Dutch youth branch of Friends of the Earth, which was working on a “Choose Climate” campaign for the European elections. She also engaged with the Dutch National Youth Council.
“You can get hopeless and worried about the future, and that’s often not the instigator for action — it can cause inaction,” Bekkers said. “Or you can go and do something about it. It’s never going to be the whole solution, as the problem is too big, but at least you’re doing something within your power to move things in the right direction.”
Bekkers now works on international climate finance through the Dutch Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate. This year, she is co-chairing the UNFCCC Veredas Dialogue, a 2026 U.N. initiative aimed at aligning global money and investments with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
“Where the money flows, the change happens,” Bekkers said.
She came to that conviction early in her career, watching ambitious climate plans stall for lack of funding. She worked as the Netherlands’ U.N. Youth Representative for Sustainable Development, participating in summits leading up to the Paris Agreement, including the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20). The agreement, she said, created a bottom-up mechanism for action, but it wasn’t automatically backed by funding to implement Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) — the individual climate action plans submitted by countries under the Paris Agreement.
Steeped in policy and implementation, Bekkers came to the Yale School of the Environment seeking a grounding in theory behind practice. She was drawn to YSE’s interdisciplinary approach and the fellowships and field work opportunities the school provides. She spent a summer interning at the U.N. Secretary-General’s executive office working on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) during the 2015 adoption process.
Motivated to push the development goals forward, she and a group of international students designed and taught a course at YSE on SDG implementation during the 2015–16 academic year, with help from Gordon Geballe, emeritus lecturer in urban ecology.
“We put many years of work into these global negotiations, and now we have these agreements and goals. So, what does it take to implement them?” she asked.
The answer, she found, came down to budgets.
“If you don’t have the support or engagement of your finance ministry, you can often forget about funding your climate goals,” she said.
After graduating, Bekkers worked as a senior country engagement specialist with the NDC Partnership, a coalition of more than 200 countries and institutions supporting the implementation of Paris Agreement commitments. Based in Washington, D.C., she worked with government ministries and development partners in 10 countries across Asia, the Middle East, and small-island states in the Pacific and Caribbean. Her work helped countries build NDC implementation and investment plans that matched national priorities with international support.
She moved back to the Netherlands to work for the Dutch Finance Ministry, leading the Coalition of Finance Ministers for Climate Action, an international climate coalition of finance ministries then co-chaired by the Netherlands. Eventually the coalition grew to 100 members, strengthening the role and capacities of finance ministries in the climate response.
Yet bottlenecks remain. There’s a mismatch, she said, between what a country wants to do and the funding it has.
“Countries across the Global South face systemic disadvantages in attracting finance for climate solutions, especially private sector finance,” she said.
The new UNFCCC Veredas Dialogue, she said, is focusing on bringing together a broader array of financial-system stakeholders including the private sector, financial sector, finance ministries, central banks, and rating agencies.
“We want to have a broader dialogue on what we need to do to really flow that finance where it is needed,” she said.
Bekkers emphasized that the climate crisis is a leadership crisis, and she laid out her argument in her book, “Zo Kan Het Niet Langer,” published in 2023. Competition, extraction, and short-term thinking keep the system from changing, she said.
“It’s sort of the feminine versus the masculine where masculine is still most dominant in our society, economy, and organizations and is more about competition, individualism, and extraction. In my view, now we have to go to a feminine system that’s about collaboration, about care, about intergenerational justice,” Bekkers said.
Now, she sees a shift happening that is driving progress — sharper, better-resourced climate pledges since Paris, a wave of local leaders governing differently despite national and global trends, and effective environmental politics she describes as driven by joy rather than fear.
“It’s about finding people who are also willing to do things a bit differently and build different systems together, as a community,” Bekkers said. “And I think, in small places, that is already happening, and that gives hope. We need that joy to keep going.”
Source: environment.yale.edu
