Our global community is facing significant challenges to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which have been compounded by global, concurrent, and compounding crises, including conflicts, climate change and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. And today’s youth will inherit the challenges in whatever state we leave them. It has been recognized that youth and their passion, creativity and innovative capacities have the potential to be crucial drivers in creating positive change. Through investing in and fostering youth’s access to entrepreneurial, scientific, and technological knowledge, solutions can be found and implemented rapidly, challenging the status-quo and leap-frogging linear development steps towards the SDGs.

This is why the World Food Forum (WFF) was created by the youth committee of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in 2021, to empower youth to transform our agrifood systems and achieve the SDGs. Now in its third year, the WFF continues to expand its reach, and in 2023 will rally around the theme: “Agrifood systems transformation accelerates climate action” – or in short, “Food Action accelerates Climate Action.”

The objective of this side event is to highlight the importance of engaging global youth in science, technology and innovation, as well as identifying and nurturing innovative solutions to accelerate agrifood systems transformation in the overall context of COVID-19 recovery, to boost climate action and achieve the 2030 Agenda goals. Speakers include senior leaders from FAO, along with the winners of the WFF’s Transformative Research Challenge (TRC) and Startup Innovation Awards, powered by Extreme Tech Challenge (XTC), as well as the WFF Young Scientists Group (YSG) and members of the newly launched Youth Food Lab incubator, in an intergenerational dialogue on the importance of investing in youth in STI.

The side event will be hybrid, hosted at the UN headquarters in New York, with a second in-person component at FAO headquarters in Rome.