Inside YEA 2025: Eliphas Mwiti on Youth Leadership Heading to UNEA7
The Youth Environmental Assembly (YEA) 2025 has emerged as a defining platform for young people to assert their voices in global environmental governance. For Eliphas Mwiti, a Global Climate Ambassador and CYMG member to UNEP, the Assembly was more than just a gathering to him. Traditionally, this is where youth move from observers to influential actors shaping decisions that affect communities worldwide, and this year was no different.
Having attended every Youth Environment Assembly since 2021, Mwiti reflects on YEA 2025 as a pivotal moment. “The central purpose of YEA 2025 is to organize, amplify, and strategically position youth voices ahead of key multilateral environmental negotiations while ensuring that our priorities, lived experiences, and solutions directly inform the decisions shaping our shared future,” he explains. He emphasizes that the Assembly not only builds technical capacity and policy understanding but also creates collective positions that are carried into OECPR, Major Groups discussions, and UNEA.
Giving Grassroots Youth a Seat at the Table
For African grassroots youth, YEA 2025 offers a rare opportunity to ensure that voices from marginalized communities are heard. Mwiti, who works with the Africa Centre for Environment, Energy and Climate Advocacy (ACEECA) in Tharaka Nithi, one of Kenya’s underserved regions, notes that the Assembly brings stories of local vulnerability, resilience, and innovation to the global stage. “Many African youths attended, with almost two-thirds of the African countries represented. YEA gives these stories visibility and turns them into collective positions that UNEP and governments cannot ignore. It is where local struggles meet global policy, and where young people like me move from the margins into meaningful participation.”
The Assembly also highlighted urgent issues affecting youth from rural and under-resourced communities. Mwiti shares that discussions ranged from climate anxiety and intergenerational injustice to biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, and ecological collapse. Youth spoke passionately about the mental health impacts of climate uncertainty, threats to food security, and consequences of unsustainable resource use. Waste management, pollution, hazardous chemicals, and inequity in climate and environmental justice were also key concerns. Mwiti stresses that “the need for real opportunities for young people, particularly from marginalized or rural areas, to participate meaningfully in UNEP processes is critical. These are not abstract issues; they reflect the daily reality of young people across Africa and beyond.”
Cross-Regional Innovation and Solutions
Beyond identifying problems, YEA 2025 became an incubator of bold, cross-regional solutions. Mwiti observed innovative ideas emerging from African, Latin American, Asian, and Pacific youth, including community-led climate accountability systems, locally driven loss-and-damage micro-funds, youth-led nature-based solutions integrating indigenous knowledge, and low-cost, locally adaptable climate technologies such as solar-powered irrigation kits and open-source air-quality sensors.
“The cross-regional dialogues were some of the most powerful moments of the Assembly. Youth from different realities, from small island states to conflict-affected regions to rapidly urbanizing African cities, recognized shared struggles and co-created solutions. Discussions went beyond advocacy to focus on implementation, accountability, and building youth systems that can survive beyond conferences,” Mwiti notes.
From Assembly Insights to Global Impact
Looking ahead, Mwiti emphasizes practical pathways for translating YEA 2025 insights into influence at UNEA-7 and other multilateral processes. Turning youth priorities on pollution, adaptation financing, food systems, and climate justice into negotiation inputs through Major Group interventions, bilateral government engagements, and informal consultations is key. Strengthening grassroots representation, building cross-regional youth alliances, enhancing follow-up and accountability, and showcasing youth-led innovations are all crucial to embedding youth voices in decision-making.
“Many of the cross-regional solutions shared at nature-based practices, circular economy models, and community climate finance can be showcased at UNEA-7 as evidence that youth are already implementing change. This strengthens the argument for youth-inclusive funding, youth advisory roles, and youth participation in national delegations. It positions young people not just as advocates, but as solution providers,” Mwiti asserts.
YEA 2025 demonstrates that young people are no longer on the sidelines of global environmental decision-making. Through platforms like these, grassroots youth from Africa and beyond are turning lived experience, innovation, and passion into actionable strategies that can reshape the future of our planet.
Inside YEA 2025: Eliphas Mwiti on Youth Leadership Heading to UNEA7
