Finalist Feature: Youth Policy Forum

Written by the Youth Policy Forum and GKI team members

The USAID-supported Accelerating Innovation for Resilience (AI4Resilience) Challenge supports the co-creation of solutions to strengthen the ecosystem for innovations fostering community-led humanitarian response and long-term resilience. The program is currently being piloted in Bangladesh. This article features one of ten solutions our Challenge Finalist organizations are designing and prototyping. Follow the AI4Resilience Challenge on LinkedIn.

Climate change is a complex problem that is intricately linked with many systems. Its impact on communities varies depending on many factors, such as demography, geography, economic landscape, etc. Effective climate adaptation and mitigation, therefore, requires localized interventions.

Evidence from the grassroots and coordination among cross-ecosystem actors are critical for building climate-resilient communities. However, inefficiencies and gaps in governance, development, entrepreneurship, and innovation systems make coordination and co-creation challenging.

“Overlooking these community-led initiatives erases invaluable evidence from the climate action space – evidence that could be used to design people-centric policies, support and scale-up grassroots innovations, and build climate resilience.”

A Climate Action Map will be developed to showcase a district-level insight into the most critical climate-change impacts and the existing locally-led interventions. Broadly, this initiative aims to support and strengthen bottom-up climate action development and foster community-led innovations and collaboration.

Follow along the Youth Policy Forum’s journey and its Climate Action Map on their Facebook page and GKI’s social media channels.