Deadline: 30 June 2025
Are you 15–30 years old and do you have an idea to protect marine resources and solve related issues at the local, national, or regional level? They want to hear from you! The Youth Innovation Challenge provides an opportunity for young people around the world to share their innovative solutions to protect marine resources.
This year’s YIC explores how they can address marine issues, including loss of biodiversity, marine debris, lack of awareness, and other related issues, and support people of all ages to be engaged stewards to support marine environments.
Focus Areas
- Marine biodiversity and conservation: Managing, protecting, and/or restoring marine biodiversity for its ecological, cultural, economic, and other values.
- Marine debris: Reducing and/or mitigating the effects of marine debris, including the monitoring, clean-up, and recycling of marine debris, and educating communities about how to address these issues.
- Public-private collaboration: Collaborating between the private sector, governments, and the public to protect marine environments. This might include ideas for cooperation between government and corporations to fulfill corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals, civic engagement opportunities for the public to engage with government programs, and other initiatives that foster collaboration between public and private sector.
Benefits
- An official YIC finalist certificate
- Recognition through GEEP, NAAEE, and other global partners’ websites and social media pages
Funding Information
- Each winner will receive a $1,000 USD prize.
Eligibility Criteria
- The Youth Innovation Challenge is intended for young leaders and innovators aged 15–30.
Selection Criteria
- Building capacity for informed choices: EE aims to provide people and communities with the knowledge, values, attitudes, and skills to help them make informed decisions about addressing environmental and social issues.
- Community-centere: Integrating environmental goals within the context of community interests, issues, and capacities puts the community at the heart of EE.
- Collaborative and inclusive: EE supports collaborative and inclusive relationships, partnerships, and coalitions. You demonstrate how partnerships will contribute to your solution’s success, and how you ensure your solution considers community members from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives.
- Focused on action: A central aim of EE is informed, committed action by individuals, groups, or communities that improves the quality of the environment.
- Informed: You have designed your solution based on an understanding of the complex social, economic, and environmental dynamics of marine debris, and provide relevant research or evidence to demonstrate this.
- Innovative: Your solution meets a need in your community, country, or region, using a new or better idea, practice, product, process, or strategy to address marine debris.
- Feasible: You, your partners, and your community collectively have the necessary skills and experiences to make your proposed solution a success.
For more information, visit GEEP.
