16 February 2015: At the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF), held at the margins of the twentieth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), a particular effort was made to incorporate youth, build their capacity to participate and demonstrate the benefit of youth engagement. As a follow up to these efforts, the Forum has released a report on building knowledge and skills among youth participants in the GLF.

The report, titled ‘Building Cross-cutting Skills and Landscape Knowledge for Effective Youth Leadership,’ covers three methods used to engage youth in the GLF: building skills; convening a youth session; and including youth moderators and panelists in GLF sessions.

Overall, the report notes that there has been a significant uptake of new skills, as some 450 participants took training and participated in webinars. The report also highlights the engagement of youth. Approximately 22% of discussion forums included youth in some capacity, yet, there were no youth representatives included in any of the plenary sessions.

The report calls online sessions and discussions engaging youth from around the world ahead of the GLF, as well as the youth session at the GLF, which garnered 600 applications for only 200 spaces, a success. However, while registration in the pre-session webinars was high, less than 50% of registrants actually participated.

In order to improve youth engagement in future sessions of the GLF, as well as other international meetings, the report calls for long-term capacity building for youth leaders, greater engagement of young professionals in regular sessions, and the adjustment of the traditional meeting format to allow for longer, more intimate discussions by youth. To help drive such changes, the publication recommends that age diversity be respected as an ambition for future iterations of the GLF. [Publication: Building Cross-cutting Skills and Landscape Knowledge for Effective Youth Leadership]