The power of youth | WestMac Media

By Erik Solheim, Head of UN Environment 

Earlier this year, I met Isabel and Melati Wijsen, teenage sisters who have started a campaign to ban plastic bags on their home island of Bali. 

In three years, they’ve organized hundreds of beach clean-ups and collected hundreds of thousands of signatures. 

Thanks to their passion and persistence, Bali will be free of plastic bags by 2018, and the rest of Indonesia will soon follow suit. 

The Wijsen sisters are living proof of why young people are so important to the planet’s future. 

We of the older generation have been staring at the same problems for decades, and it’s too easy for us to lose our ambition or get stuck in the same tired approaches. 

Our best hope for tackling the planet’s many challenges is to invest in you, the younger generation. 

Today’s young people make up the single largest generation that the world has ever seen. They are also the first generation to grow up with an understanding of climate change, and the last to have the chance to help us avoid its most disastrous effects. 

As I’ve seen time and again, when young people are given opportunities and support, they can be powerful catalysts for change. 

In December, we will announce the names of the world’s first six Young Environmental Champions. These six winners, one from each global region (Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America & the Caribbean, North America, and West Asia), will receive seed funding and intensive training that will help them put their bold environmental ideas into action. 

But the Young Champions Initiative isn’t just about those six winners. It is our hope that the competition will encourage hundreds of young people around the world to develop innovative ways to tackle environmental problems.

We want to foster a network of like-minded young people who can support each other, learn from each other, and inspire each other to build a better, cleaner, healthier world for us all. 

I urge you to take up the Young Champions challenge. Start by looking around you. What environmental problems do you see in your neighbourhood, your city, or your country? Maybe you want to design an entirely new response to a longstanding problem, or start a business that can scale up an existing innovation. 

We’re eager to hear your ideas, and we will soon have a community of mentors who can help you bring them to life. 

Finally, I would like to offer just one word of advice: As you start pursuing your ideas, you will almost certainly fail. All of us do. In fact, you will probably fail many times. 

But more than anything, the key to success is picking yourself up on the bad days and deciding to keep at it. 

You fail, you learn, and you adapt. And then perhaps you fail again. But you don’t abandon your ambitions. 

Having this kind of resilience, I believe, will take you a lot further than pure brilliance. 

This planet is yours to inherit, and it’s yours to shape. We’re here to support your energy, ideas and passion. So let’s get started. Credit: Young Champions of the Earth.