“Now is the best time:” ASEAN youth leaders raise biodiversity awareness, participation online amid COVID-19
ASEAN youth come together in an online biodiversity event where biodiversity issues and initiatives in the region were discussed. Screenshot courtesy of Nadia Putri Rachma Persada
As shelter-in-place directives are in force and movement is restricted in the ASEAN region and elsewhere in the world, ASEAN youth leaders go online to drive home the importance of biodiversity conservation for humanity’s future.
No strangers to technology, the ASEAN Youth Biodiversity Leaders (YBLs) have transitioned from organising in-person activities to online workshops and gatherings, with topics ranging from biodiversity loss, plastic pollution and illegal wildlife trade, to youth participation through volunteering, starting an organisation, and providing inputs for the crafting of their country’s laws on biodiversity.
The YBL is part of the ASEAN Youth Biodiversity Programme spearheaded by the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ACB), in collaboration with the Global Youth Biodiversity Network, and with the support of EU through the Biodiversity Conservation and Management of Protected Areas (BCAMP) project.
Mobilising the youth
Cirilo Lagnason, Jr., the programme head of Kidlikasan, a youth environmental organisation based in the Philippines, gave a talk on organising the youth in one of the online discussions initiated by the Earth Island Institute Philippines in celebration of Earth Day.
“The pandemic should not limit the work that we can do for biodiversity. Our work should cross borders and we should see it as an opportunity to raise awareness by making use of technology as our friend,” Lagnason said.
Lagnason is also part of the 2019 Cohort of the YBL fellowship, a one-year training and mentorship designed to take youth leaders’ conservation impact to the next level.
Lagnason spoke about conducting activities with its 39 members and over 100 volunteers in South-Central Mindanao despite minimal resources. “Don’t let lack of funds stop you,” he advised.
He said while grand activities are great, low-key activities can still have huge impacts on the environment.
“Now is the best time to act. It is better to mobilise the youth when there are dramatic or disturbing significant events in the community,” he said citing the increasing participation of the youth at the height of COVID-19 pandemic.
With their hyper connectivity and aptitude for harnessing technologies, young people can overcome physical movement restrictions due to the pandemic, and mobilise for biodiversity conservation.
Lagnason’s organisation, Kidlikasan, is a finalist of the Ten Accomplished Youth Organizations award in the Philippines.
Meanwhile, recognising the link between biodiversity degradation and diseases like COVID-19, Lin Ji Liaw, a YBL from Brunei Darussalam, organised a sharing session on this link and the importance of protecting natural habitats to address these. Liaw is the founder of BruWILD, an educational organisation working to conserve Brunei’s flora and fauna.
A YBL from Indonesia, Nadia Putri Rachma Persada was a resource speaker at an event, “Youth Talks on Biological Diversity” in April, organised by Teens Go Green, a youth organisation in Indonesia.
“This pandemic is another reminder for us to really start living in harmony with nature,” said Putri, Jakarta coordinator for Biodiversity Warriors in Indonesia.
Putri talked about pressing issues in Indonesia, like overexploitation of resources such as illegal logging and wildlife trade and unsustainable practices like plastic waste disposal, as well as the impact of these practices on wildlife, and on people’s access to basic needs like food and water. She encouraged the youth to contribute to biodiversity conservation efforts.
Joining Putri at the event was Karl Png Jun Qiang, 2019 YBL for Singapore and a member of the Environmental Biology Interest Group at the National University of Singapore.
Png talked about his biodiversity work in Singapore, among them bringing together a community of students at the National University of Singapore to encourage the country’s next naturalists. He expressed concern that most Singaporean youth are urbanites and are losing their connection with nature.
The event, according to Putri, was well-received, and the audience of students, fresh graduates, and general public were eager to learn about volunteering opportunities to help in biodiversity conservation.
Voices in policy-making
The youth should also participate in the crafting of their country’s laws on biodiversity. This is what Kittikun Saksung, a YBL from Thailand, had in mind when he and his team at the Thailand Youth Biodiversity Network organised the Youth Voices for Biodiversity Act, originally planned to be a face-to-face engagement. With restrictions on large gatherings, his team pivoted to push through with the event as a series of online biodiversity knowledge sharing sessions and public youth hearings to get inputs from the youth for Thailand’s draft Biodiversity Act. The new Act is intended to provide a unified and effective tool for biodiversity management in Thailand, among others.
“This is a big opportunity for young people to gather together and make our voices heard,” Saksung said. “The main goal was to create a collaborative position paper of youth towards the drafting of the Biodiversity Act.”
Making the event online also allowed many Thai youth from other provinces, or those currently studying abroad, to participate.
Saksung revealed that he was inspired to organise the event after he and Png were sent as youth representatives by the ACB through BCAMP to the second round of negotiations about the post-2020 global biodiversity framework in Rome, Italy at the end of February 2020. The post-2020 framework will give directions to the world’s governments in their policies and programmes in safeguarding biodiversity beyond 2020. Coming back from global-level discussions, Saksung wanted to ensure the youth’s voice is also heard for biodiversity policies in his home country.
During the negotiations in Italy, Saksung was able to experience inter-sessional consultative meetings with different agencies, industries, non-government and government organisations, and academe, which prepared him for the online consultation with Thailand’s youth.
He said the youth and other attendees gained a greater appreciation for biodiversity through the online knowledge-sharing sessions. Thailand Youth Biodiversity Network on its Facebook page also acknowledged youth participation in the online public youth hearings, which ended on 3 May, and has committed to compile the youth’s inputs. These inputs will be submitted to Thailand’s Office of National Resources and Environmental Policy and Planning (ONEP) for consideration for the draft Biodiversity Act.
Collaborate, seek support
Asking for help and collaborating is also important for the success of any initiative.
Lagnason said their organisation asked local government officials to help sponsor meals and venues for their events.
Saksung said that their online sessions with Thailand’s youth were co-organised with ONEP. BioFin (Biodiversity Financing) and the United Nations Development Programme also provided speaker recommendations, and connected them with various networks. The success of their sessions was partly because they sought advice from “people with better knowledge.”
Collaborating with youth from other ASEAN Member States also offers an opportunity to learn from one another and work together.
“Indonesia and Singapore have a huge difference in biodiversity matters, but we still have similar problems and we could learn from each other, and highlight which part our youth can work together to have the most powerful impact,” Putri said about her and Png’s participation in the same biodiversity event.
Png echoed Putri’s statements, adding that he also wanted to bring home insights from the session to fellow Singaporean youth. He said these insights will help them understand the region’s biodiversity more, an understanding which would be important for future collaborations.
Future directions
In the weeks leading up to the celebration of the International Day for Biological Diversity on 22 May, YBLs from the 2019 and 2020 Cohort held a number of online events and campaigns across the ASEAN region: from busting myths on bees and creating biodiversity-inspired recipes, to teaching others how to make compost or create their own garden, as well as celebrating the inseparable link between biodiversity and cultural diversity through songs.
AYBP Coordinator Mika Tan expressed confidence that the YBLs’ initiatives will carry on despite challenges like the pandemic. “The youth have always been ingenious even before the covid-19 pandemic. They will always find ways when they are driven by their passion for biodiversity,” Tan said.
She described a text-based biodiversity seminar organised by the YBLs and held entirely on WhatsApp, which allowed even youth with a weak mobile signal or patchy internet connection to participate, as the seminar did not demand the same bandwidth that a video conference or seminar would.
For her part, ACB Executive Director Theresa Mundita Lim commended the YBLs’ initiatives and shared hopes for the work ahead in safeguarding biodiversity. “The youth are the rights holders of the Earth’s future, and they play an important part in advocating for biodiversity conservation as a long-term solution so that pandemics like the one we are experiencing are less likely to happen again,” she said.
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