Across agriculture, fisheries, and food production, young people are already driving change: restoring landscapes, promoting agroecology, participating in cooperatives, and building fairer, healthier, and more resilient food systems. Yet their voices remain underrepresented in policy processes, and their potential continues to be underutilized. As members of YOUNGO Food & Agriculture, the official Children and Youth Constituency of the UNFCCC, we reaffirm our commitment to building food systems grounded in intergenerational justice, ecosystem integrity, equitable livelihoods, and climate resilience.
What We Will Do
- Scale youth-led agroecology: restore soils, regenerate landscapes, revive seed sovereignty, and strengthen local nutrition and community food security.
- Facilitate cross-regional knowledge exchange: share Indigenous practices, climate adaptation strategies, and community-based food sovereignty models.
- Develop inclusive monitoring frameworks: track yields, emissions, and social indicators (fairness, inclusion, diversity, wellbeing) to ensure accountability.
- Advocate for integrated policymaking: bridge agriculture, health, nutrition, biodiversity, and climate to end siloed governance.
What We're Calling On Others to Do
- Institutionalise youth leadership: guarantee seats at decision-making tables, provide dedicated funding, and build capacities for meaningful participation.
- Embed food systems in climate policy: integrate food, agroecology, regenerative agriculture, and food loss reduction into NDCs, NAPs, and national pathways.
- Unlock climate finance for youth transitions: expand direct-access funding and co-finance youth-led regenerative and smallholder initiatives.
- Recognise agroecology as a climate solution: enable youth-led initiatives to access adaptation and biodiversity finance.
From school farms in Gabon to seed heritage projects in India and land restoration in Zambia, youth-led solutions are already reshaping our future. We demand co-design, co-funding, and co-accountability. Food systems cannot be climate-just without youth leadership at every level.
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