The spotlight on youth: Young people as key stakeholders in biosphere reserves and the Man and the Biosphere Programme
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Issue Date
2021-04
Authors
Barraclough, Alicia Donnellan
Måren, Ingel Elisabeth
MAB Youth Consortia
License
Subject
Abstract
Sustainable development has at his
heart the mission to make our planet a life-sustaining
place for future generations. Young stakeholders
are key to sustainability transformations,
both as active participants that push them forward
but also as actors vulnerable to being left behind.
As testing sites for sustainable development, Biosphere
Reserves (BRs) are home to millions of
young people in over 124 countries. Very little research
or knowledge exists on how young people
experience living in BRs, how they contribute towards
BRs’ goals, or how they see BRs moving
forward under global change. To increase young
stakeholder’s visibility and inclusion in the MAB
programme, UNESCO-MAB has organized two
MAB Youth Forums attended by over 300 youth,
one in Italy in 2017 and one in China in 2019.
Here we present a short commentary on what we
believe were the main take-away’s generated during
these events and the research that followed them. Firstly, we present a research note of the
first global-level study on young stakeholder’s
perspectives of BR implementation, discussing a
thematic analysis of the results generated during
the MAB-Youth Forum workshops and surveys.
Secondly, we present an overview of the “MAB
Youth Declaration”, a collaborative text which
was generated over the course of four days and
which distils the main messages young people
living in BRs wish to convey to the MAB community
and beyond. Our paper highlights the important
role young stakeholders play in BRs,
whose understandings reflect the social, economic
and ecological complexity in which BRs
are embedded. Their concerns span a diversity of
topics, from the relevance of fair conservation
practices and respect for biocultural diversity, to
the importance of sustainable livelihood opportunities
and fair youth representation in decisionmaking
bodies. Thus, we highlight research findings on the need to increase young stakeholder
integration and participation within environmental
governance. Finally, we urge the BR
research community to practice youth-inclusive
research that helps generate knowledge to support
evidence-based decision making in BRs.