Every August 12, International Youth Day recognizes the contributions of young people to sustainable development. The 2026 theme, “Different Contexts, Common Aspirations,” reflects the different conditions young people face and the shared goals that connect their efforts.

This year’s theme is especially relevant to global food systems, which shape both the livelihoods and well-being of young people around the world. Globally, 44% of working youth were employed in agrifood systems in 202.  At the same time, food insecurity among young people increased from 16.7% in 2014–2016 to 24.4% in 2021–2023. These figures show how closely young people’s futures are tied to the challenges and opportunities within food systems.

Young people are playing an increasingly active role in responding to these challenges and shaping the future of food systems. Across different regions and circumstances, they are developing solutions that reflect the needs of their own communities, from agriculture and school food to public policy, food waste, and the commercial environments that influence what people eat. The five examples below show how young people are turning local ideas into action and contributing to broader food-system change.

Bringing Precision Agriculture to Farmers — Benin

Food insecurity continues to affect communities across the West African nation of Benin, particularly during the lean season when access to food becomes more difficult. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects that more than 201,000 people will face acute food insecurity between June and August 2026. These pressures increase the need for practical agricultural innovations that can help farmers improve productivity, use resources more efficiently, and strengthen resilience against disturbances.

Young agricultural researcher Marietta Gonroudobou founded Agro Hikari to connect scientific knowledge with farmers. The platform translates agronomic research into practical guidance and has expanded into digital agriculture. Gonroudobou has also developed a drone-based spraying solution designed to make agricultural input use more precise.

In 2026, the World Food Prize Foundation named Gonroudobou a Top Agri-food Pioneer. Agro Hikari also won the Benin edition of the Prix Pierre Castel and received €25,000 plus a year of mentorship. The project remains an emerging model, and this support provides an opportunity to test its precision-agriculture services at a larger scale.

Rethinking the Waste That Comes With School Lunch — United States

Disposable food service items contribute to a large stream of plastic waste in the United States, including the polystyrene trays still used in many school cafeterias. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the country generated about 80,000 tons of polystyrene containers in 2018, and less than 5,000 tons were recycled. In Houston, three fourth-graders brought attention to this issue by questioning the use of disposable polystyrene trays in their school cafeterias.

In 2025, River Oaks Elementary students Celine David, Maddie Woods, and Dora Cabarcas researched alternatives to polystyrene lunch trays. They gathered more than 250 signatures on an online petition and presented their findings to Houston Independent School District leaders. Their efforts helped prompt HISD to launch a pilot program testing alternative trays at River Oaks Elementary and Hogg Middle School.

Evidence from other school systems suggests that reusable serviceware can substantially reduce cafeteria waste. A 2026 study of California elementary schools found that schools using reusable trays and other serviceware reduced packaging and serviceware waste by about 5 kilograms less packaging and serviceware waste per day than schools that continued using disposable items. The HISD pilot will help the district assess how these alternatives perform in practice and whether they can be expanded more widely. The students’ campaign shows how young people can use research and community engagement to influence decisions within their own schools and communities.

Turning Youth Innovation Into Food-System Solutions — Indonesia

Indonesia faces a generational challenge in agriculture. Almost 80 percent of the country’s farmers are age 40 or older, while young people ages 15 to 29 account for about half of its unemployed population. Together, these trends highlight an opportunity to connect youth employment and entrepreneurship with the future of agriculture.

The 2025 Youth Innovation Challenge received more than 230 proposals and selected 18 finalists for mentorship and training. Winning projects included vertical farming that reuses kitchen waste, artificial intelligence for fruit-fly control, and circular systems that convert food scraps into farm inputs. Ten innovators shared Rp84 million in awards and presented their ideas to government representatives.

The program gave young people an opportunity to develop and refine their ideas while connecting with institutions that could support implementation. Initiatives like this can provide early support for locally  developed solutions, helping young innovators test what works and identify approaches with the potential to grow.

Challenging the Food Advertising Environment — United Kingdom

The food system extends beyond how food is grown and produced to the environments that influence what people see, choose, and buy. A 2025 University of Liverpool study found that 44 percent of surveyed outdoor advertisements promoted food or drinks, with one in four promoting unhealthy products. These advertisements appeared six times more often per kilometer in the most deprived areas studied.

Youth activists with Bite Back responded through the 2025 Commercial Break campaign. They placed youth-designed messages across 365 advertising spaces in London and called for stronger limits on unhealthy food marketing. Organizers estimated that the intervention prevented about 14.8 million people from being exposed to the advertisements that would otherwise have occupied those spaces.

UK-wide restrictions on less healthy food advertising on television before 9 p.m. and in paid online advertising took effect on January 5, 2026. However, the national rules do not cover billboards or other outdoor advertising, which remains a focus of Bite Back’s advocacy. The campaign demonstrates how young people can use evidence and advocacy to engage companies and policymakers around the food environments that shape consumption.

Bringing Youth Ideas Into Food Policy — Ecuador

Food loss and waste pose both environmental and food-security pressures in Ecuador. A 2025 report by the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic and the Global FoodBanking Network estimates that more than 900,000 tons of food are lost or wasted each year. The report  also found that 37 percent of the population experienced moderate or severe food insecurity between 2020 and 2022.

The World Food Forum Ecuador Youth Chapter has brought young people into national discussions about this issue. In October 2025, the chapter convened youth with government institutions, food banks, and civil-society organizations. The meeting helped gather evidence and advanced a coordinated proposal to reform Ecuador’s food loss and waste law.

In 2026, the chapter continued developing youth skills through training in project management, resource mobilization, and public policy. More than 30 young leaders from eight provinces participated in a May workshop that also strengthened connections among youth networks. Its work shows how youth groups can bring local concerns into formal policy discussions.

Cultivating Change

Global food challenges are complex, and they often result from deep, underlying, and interrelated factors that no single solution can address. Effective responses need to reflect the social, environmental, and economic conditions of each place. Meaningful progress therefore depends on understanding how a problem operates locally and developing solutions that respond to its underlying drivers.

The youth-led efforts featured here show how place-based action can create spaces for innovation. Young people are testing technologies, mobilizing communities, and engaging institutions around problems they experience locally. These experiments can reveal practices that work under specific conditions. Governments, companies, and nonprofits can then evaluate those lessons and adapt promising approaches elsewhere.

Youth-led ideas can have greater impact when young people have sustained support to develop and expand them. Mentorship builds technical and organizational capacity, financing provides the time and resources needed to strengthen promising initiatives, and partnerships with governments, civil society, businesses, and other institutions can create pathways for wider adoption. FAO research similarly highlights investment, meaningful participation in decision-making, access to skills and resources, and improved financing as key conditions for youth engagement in agrifood-system transformation.

International Youth Day is an opportunity to celebrate young people’s contributions while recognizing what they need to turn ideas to lasting change. It’s also an opportunity to turn that creativity into action. Young people can support EARTHDAY.ORG’s Canopy Tree Project, explore our Climate Education campaign, or join The Great Global Cleanup. Each offers a way to take action and mobilize others. This International Youth Day, find a challenge in your community and help cultivate a solution.

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To mark Earth Day 2026, we spoke with Marcele Oliveira, a youth climate leader from Brazil whose work centers on climate education, community organizing, and amplifying Global South voices in international spaces.

Marcele Oliveira is a youth climate leader and cultural producer from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She served inside the COP Presidency and works at the intersection of community organizing, climate justice, and Global South advocacy.

Interview facilitated by EARTHDAY.ORG South America with special thanks to Rodolfo Ropo Beltran, Regional Director, EARTHDAY.ORG South America.

Q: Tell us a bit about yourself. What first shaped your path into climate leadership?

My climate activism started in Realengo — a neighborhood in the western zone of RIo de Janeiro, a peripheral community. There, we fought for a green park, and that really changed my life. It’s now changing the lives of my family, my brothers, my nephews. I really believe public spaces and a relationship with nature can send a strong message about the life we want to live.

When we talk about nature, community, and trees, we are not talking about something separate from us. I realized that when I understood the importance of that green park in my community. And now we are seeing many different young people working inside communities, defending their territories — because of the consequences of climate change, yes, but also because they have solutions and proposals to make things change. We say in Brazil it’s mutirão — collective effort. But every time I say that, it starts in Realengo. In my home.

Q: What did the fight for that park teach you about environmental justice?

When I understood the environmental racism in my community through that fight, it was also a moment to amplify the work we were already doing with cultural practices and arts communication. We moved the conversation around the park, and now it’s become public policy — my city doesn’t just have one green park but many, connected with a broader agenda.

Looking at that, and then looking at floods and heat waves, I understood: being a climate activist is not optional. It’s not just because we want to defend nature. It’s also because we want to defend people — especially the people we love, especially people living in marginalized communities.

Climate action is a proposition of life for everybody, because we know the impacts are different if you are in a big building versus an indigenous community. The injustice is inside the conversation, and climate justice is the invitation for action.

Q: This year’s Earth Day theme is “Out Power, Our Planet.” What does that mean to you in the context of youth leadership?

For me, it’s about mutual youth energy — the energy that says: you don’t need to do the same thing I did, you don’t need to be in the same spaces. But you do need to take care of your community and the trees around you.

In my city, marginalized communities, the peripheries, don’t have trees anymore because of globalization and urbanization. But the wealthier zones have trees, public spaces, museums, cinemas. Who is making those decisions about the cities we live in? It’s our power, our planet, our cities, our lives.

Last year, we launched a youth platform to connect youth movements and action agendas. In one month, 307 submissions came in from 46 countries. That’s a major milestone — proof of the connection between grassroots action and UN climate decision-making, and a reminder of how much effort we must keep investing in that connection.

Q: What needs to change to better equip young people to take part in climate decision-making?

Three things: access, funding, and connected strategy.

Funding is essential — it’s impossible to do good work without the necessary support. And I say this from experience. I participated in a youth climate negotiations program in my city that was free. I’m not an international relations scholar; I’m a cultural producer. Without free capacity building, what we’re doing would be impossible.

We also need young people to not just be in the room, but to be heard — because just following the steps is not enough in a context of emergency. We need to be creative. We need to do things differently. We need open spaces for more people in decision-making roles.

During COP, we ran a campaign with youth organizations calling for five percent of climate finance to go to youth. The youth are driving climate solutions but are not being compensated for that. That, too, is climate injustice.

Q: What progress are you seeing in climate education across South America?

Last year we had the luck to work with all the biomes in Brazil — the Amazon, the Cerrado, the Caatinga, the Pantanal, the Pampa, and the Atlantic Forest, which is mine. The conversation about climate changed in the common understanding of people, because not everyone follows COP discussions, but everyone knew the COP was held in Belém do Pará. That was a powerful moment for climate justice discourse, and it’s brought more people into the conversation.

At COP last year, for the first time, people of African descent were nominated in decision-making roles. The first time. That is a recognition of the existence of people like me.

Climate education also means understanding our relationship with nature, with decision-making spaces, and with the understanding that global decisions have local impacts. We need an education that builds capacity to advocate and lead — and that recognizes knowledge coming not just from data or academic contexts, but from people, from ancestors, and from ways of living with the Earth that were sustainable long before now. The IPCC itself has formally acknowledged the importance of traditional knowledge for adaptation and resilience. We need to center that.

Q: How does climate change show up in the daily lives of communities in Brazil and across the Global South?

Many times, heat waves in my country seemed like a normal thing — I’m from Rio de Janeiro, it’s always hot. But now it’s hot in a different way. Going to school starts to be a challenge. Classes get canceled because of the heat. We now have protocols in Rio for medium and high heat waves. I was recently in New York in April and it was 30 degrees Celsius. That is not right.

When temperature changes that drastically, it affects food, transportation, everything. And in the Global South, this doesn’t just represent a challenge in your day — it represents people dying. It represents people having to leave their homes and sometimes not coming back. UNICEF data tells us that one in three children and young people in the world live in areas where at least four climate and environmental shocks overlap. Not one — four or more.

In Brazil, 67 percent of people living in environmental risk areas are Black. I’m talking about my father, my mother, my friends. This is not just unfair. This is an interruption of our lives.

Q: Why is it essential that leadership from the Global South shapes broader climate solutions?

Because solutions need to come from those living the problem. The Global South is home to the world’s most vital ecosystems, the majority of global biodiversity, and communities whose traditional knowledge holds real answers — not just in beautiful speeches, but in daily routines, with children and communities.

If climate solutions are designed only in the Global North and only in global institutions, they won’t be enough. The real solutions won’t be included. Important data — disaggregated by gender, race, history — won’t be considered. You cannot solve a problem without listening to the people living it.

That’s why our work, at its core, is about listening. And starting from that listening to build hope on the table.

Q: You’ve spoken about mutirão as a model for climate action. What does that look like in practice?

Mutirão is a Tupi-Guaraní word from Brazil’s indigenous tradition. You can translate it as “collective effort,” but it’s mutirão because it’s about doing together. And you only make mutirão when something is wrong.

I’ve made mutirão many times — waking up with neighbors to clean a church, or communities coming together after a flood to build something new. A lot of people around the world are making mutirão right now, because something happened: a flood, a disaster.

When communities move together, everybody moves together. When women move, when children move, when people of African descent and indigenous communities move — we’re all in this conversation. We have too many decisions being made by a small group, while the solutions may be in a place that group isn’t listening to.

When we share responsibility — not compete, but share — and connect solutions at scale, we can move communities from Belém do Pará and Addis Ababa, from Greenland and the Amazon of Colombia, all at the same time. That collective force is mutirão in real life.

Q: What gives you hope right now in the climate movement?

My friends. My friends are always the reason I have hope. We work so much — many times without pay, as volunteers — because we believe in the importance of our voices inside decision-making spaces. And sometimes we’re exhausted. Many times I am exhausted. But we talk to each other and we support each other.

I was nominated by the President of my country, President Lula, to a climate leadership role. But first, I was nominated by my friends. That means everything.

And our role, when we do have visibility, is to use it to recommend and invite — not just me, but people from the Amazon, youth from Belém do Pará, people from the peripheries, people of African descent and indigenous communities. Every time I do that and see it happen — a friend in a space, sharing their experience and feeling that they are in the right place — that gives me hope. We are on the right path.

Q: What is one action people can take this Earth Day to step into their power?

Start where you are.

I was once so overwhelmed with studying and work that I didn’t notice the trees in my own periphery disappearing. When I noticed, that was the moment I connected the big global discussion on climate change to the local fight for a green park in Realengo.

Look at your own territory — your neighborhood, your friends, your school, your community. Understand what is necessary to organize there for a better life. Try to find your people, because sometimes we feel alone, but we’re not. Connect with the children you love. Follow the road to COP 31. Join your local Conference of Youth.

And don’t compare yourself to others. There is no single right way to do this — if there were, we wouldn’t be in a crisis. Your voice, your future, your history, your community: this is climate action. This is what matters.

The movement needs all of us. So start where you are. When you start, the pathways will appear.

The post Start Where You Are: Youth Climate Leader Marcele Oliveira appeared first on Earth Day.