Towards Meaningful Youth Engagement: Practice of “Green Future Makers”

There is a growing momentum regarding the necessity of youth engagement in environmental processes.A recent milestone is the resolution adopted at the 7th United Nations Environmental Assembly (UNEA-7) in December 2025, titled "Resolution on enhancing the meaningful participation of youth in Environmental Processes and on environmental education (UNEP 2025)."This resolution explicitly recognizes youth as "agents of change," and encourages Member States to provide them with substantive opportunities to participate in environmental processes.In alignment with global trajectory, Japan has shown a policy shift in 2024, the basic policy under the Act on the Promotion of Environmental Conservation Activities through Environmental Education was revised.In the face of the "triple planetary crisis" -climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution -compounded by the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, a fundamental societal transformation is required.The participation of youth, alongside other stakeholders, is considered vital to realizing this shift toward a sustainable society.Specifically, the revised basic policy emphasizes the importance of dialogue, collaboration, networking, and the creation of learning opportunities as key interventions.This policy landscape anticipates not only encouraging youth participation but also multistakeholder implementation that extends beyond formal educational institutions.However, there is a clear disconnect between these policy expectations and the documented evidence of such practices in Japan.In the Japanese Journal of Environmental Education, for example, most literature referencing "youth" treats them primarily as a conceptual pillar or thematic subject of international discourse, such as Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Global Citizenship Education (GCE) (e.g., Sato 2014, 2015; Noguchi 2021).Concrete case studies of youth-led activities in Japan remain scarce.Some notable contributions were made through local-level activities, such as the ESD project in Toyama Prefecture (Tabiraki et al. 2015) and the "Kankyo (Environmental) Cafe" initiatives co-led by climate youth groups (Tada et al. 2024(Tada et al. , 2025)).Against this background, this paper introduces and reflects upon a youth capacity-building programme called "Green Future Makers," planned and implemented by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), and NatureLit Japan (NLJ) with the support of Change Our