Youth Innovation Competition on Global Governance 2023 opens in Dali

What can university students do for the biodiversity of the Earth? The Youth Innovation Competition on Global Governance 2023 may tell you the answer.

Sixty-four students from 29 countries gathered in Dali of Yunnan Province on Wednesday for the opening of the competition organized by the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University.

Jin Li, president of Fudan University, officially opened the competition at Dali University and called on the young contestants to devote their passion and wisdom to make a contribution to the global ecological civilization and the shared future of mankind.

First launched in 2007, the event has attracted 2,359 contestants from 284 universities and institutions in 98 countries and regions, who have submitted about 800 proposals on global issues over the past 16 years, Jin said.

He said the event, the first international public welfare program founded and organized by Chinese university students for their peers from all over the world, is showing increasing global influence.

This year, the competition welcomed participants from seven new participating countries – Ireland, Timor-Leste, Montenegro, Portugal, El Salvador, Somalia and Jamaica – and 17 new participating universities, including the University of Cambridge in the UK, Columbia University in the United States and Nanyang Technological University of Singapore.

This year, the preliminary session of the competition with the theme of biodiversity attracted 255 students from 50 universities in 49 countries and regions. They submitted a wide range of proposals, including building a global seed bank network to solve the world ecological crisis, revolutionizing biodiversity conservation with environmental DNA, and applying bionics in agriculture to protect food security.

Based on assessment by judges, 64 contestants were selected to make the final at Dali.

Dali was chosen as the host city for the final competition as Yunnan hosted the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) in 2021, and the province safeguarded a group of wild elephants migrating from Xishuangbanna to Kunming, which demonstrated China's resolve and efforts in biodiversity protection.

Dali features rich natural resources and biodiversity, with about 3,800 species of seed plants, 257 kinds of birds and 439 large fungus species.

In the following week, the students will be divided into nine groups to analyze current ecological crises and submit proposals on the theme of "Biodiversity Breeds Prosperity", with specific topics ranging from balancing economic growth and biodiversity, achieving political global consensus, to building social cohesive efforts.

At the opening ceremony, Jin delivered a keynote speech to introduce his Human Phenome Project, which tries to obtain a wide range of physical, chemical and biological metrics that can be applied to improving clinical care and build up a human phenome atlas.

Another keynote speaker Arkebe Oqubay, former senior minister and special advisor to the prime minister of Ethiopia, emphasized the impact of climate change on biodiversity and stressed the importance of supporting policies and practical measures, such as the reduction of carbon emissions and the use of green energy to create a good environment for preserving global biodiversity.

There will be a field work session which will take the contestants to local biodiversity protection programs, including the Yunlong Tianchi National Nature Reserve, to learn local practices in biodiversity protection. The reserve is home to a Yunan golden snub-nosed monkey habitat restoration project in cooperation with Alibaba's Ant Forest, a mobile game on Alipay to turn users' low-carbon deeds, such as recycling clothes and biking to work, into real trees planted in areas in the country in need of vegetation.

They will also brainstorm to formulate a declaration for protecting biodiversity all over the world.