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Sahana is a youth advocate who runs educational and policy-producing initiatives focused on climate action and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
How are you using education to build more sustainable and equitable communities?
As a co-organizer of YOUNGO’s 2021 Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) Youth Forum, I helped plan and execute a week-long series of side events and discussions. ACE is a provision in the Paris Agreement that promotes climate action via principles like education and training. More than 700 youth registered for the forum, and we reached almost 2,000 people from 130 countries. The forum produced 33 ideas for various themes, including ACE infrastructure and methods of mitigating ACE barriers. I am now helping develop an ACE Action Plan.
Via my nonprofit, Project All For All, I work to help youth participate in civic engagement and advance progress towards the SDGs. Through initiatives like a capacity-building conference, youth network, and an “Open School,” I’ve reached around 5,000 people.
I have also reached thousands of people via EE-related public speaking engagements: from talking about “Youth Opportunities for Climate Action” at the Regional Dialogue on Youth Empowerment in Climate Actions and “Malaysia and COP26” at a Friends of the Earth UK event, to delivering an intervention on the Paris Agreement’s 6th Article at SB52 and co-producing a training on “Climate Change and Public Health.”
My journey began with school-based community events, broadened to local and national human rights advocacy, and has now reached regional and global work on climate action, the SDGs, and human rights. I am driven by the realisation that whilst there are plenty of solutions to most social and planetary issues, there simply isn’t enough being done to implement them. I also hope to study and work at the intersection of public policy and environmental studies, and I am inspired by other young people I volunteer with who are driving environmental progress locally and globally.
If you were to choose one place to live for the rest of your life, where would it be?
Copenhagen, Denmark.
What are you happiest doing?
Either writing policy reports or re-watching The Office!
If a genie granted you one wish, what would it be?
Definitely more wishes – I’d be too indecisive to settle on one :)
