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Youth play a vital role in addressing environmental crises, yet they face major barriers in policymaking arenas.
This piece follows three young advocates and activists as they work towards a regional policy for environmental rights with the ASEAN Environmental Rights Working Group – highlighting both their potential and the challenges they face in driving meaningful change.
Youth advocates Max Han, Fithriyyah and Kyn Mallorca attend the 4th ASEAN Environmental Law Conference in Bangkok, Thailand.
Photo: ASEAN Youth Forum.
I graduated with a hospitality degree and dreamed of working in tourism. When applying for jobs, I received more comments on my appearance, like the length of my hair, than about my qualifications. As a trans woman, I have always been seen as “deviant.”
It was in activism that I found a community. In my queer peers, I found love and acceptance. Among rights advocates, I found inspiration. As an LGBTQIA+ activist, I’ve found a voice to advocate for justice for my community.
My feminist and trans rights activism frequently intersects with environmental justice. Coming from the typhoon-stricken Philippines, I experienced it first-hand. I never want to feel again the stress of worrying about making ends meet, finding clean water for my family, and accessing gender-affirming healthcare for myself during the double crises of COVID and typhoon Odette in 2021.
When invited to join the ASEAN Environmental Rights Working Group, I was excited to bring LGBTQIA+ youth voices to the table.
I come from a small town in Borneo, Indonesia. I remember watching news coverage of the Gaza war in 2012. Seeing doctors saving lives amidst the worst horrors of war inspired me to be a doctor.
However, in pursuing a medical career, I saw how public health and environmental health are intimately connected. In 2023, an outbreak of dengue fever in my town after extreme heat and heavy rains made me realize that climate change and infectious diseases are tightly linked. I also saw how access to healthcare is an overlooked justice issue in environmental policy.
Like Kyn, I felt compelled to seize the chance in the ASEAN Environmental Rights Working Group. To me, curing a disease is not just about prescribing medicine. I want to remind lawyers and policymakers to integrate health into environmental policies.
My love for the environment started young. I remember my childhood in a small village in Malaysia where I ran around barefoot picking rambutans. As a student, I worked on a project to reduce plastic pollution by day and studied nocturnal mammals by night.
My passion led me to found Youths United for Earth, a grassroots organization mobilizing youth for climate justice. It also brought me to regional and global policy platforms, where I realized that while opportunities for youth engagement are increasing, many remain tokenistic.
The ASEAN Working Group was supposed to give our voices equal weight. Alongside Kyn and Fithriyyah, we represent the ASEAN Youth Forum, sitting with other environment and human rights experts to shape the region’s first policy on environmental rights.
Kyn, Fithriyyah and Max came to the ASEAN Environmental Rights Working Group with much optimism and aspiration.
“In my past experiences, even in the UN, youth are often given just two minutes to speak. Here, we are the decision-makers. We can take time to articulate our position,” Max shared.
Fithriyyah agreed: “In this platform, we, the youth, are not just consulted. We participate.”
The opportunity means even more for the group, as it would be the first regional policy to combine human rights and the environment.
Kyn recalls her optimism early on: “It was supposed to be a progressive and positive experience, and that was why I decided to join.”
Being young in policymaking is not easy. Structural barriers remain for youth engagement in the Working Group.
The group had to work hard to get used to the policy language and negotiation practices. “As youth,” Max shared, “we have the technical capacity, but we must work two to three times harder to match adults with more experience.”
Furthermore, they lacked the resources and support available to more established actors like NGOs. Their efforts to solicit public input on the declaration, for instance, were constrained by a consultation window of less than a month and no funding.
Even more frustratingly, having a seat at the table does not always mean being taken seriously.
Based on public consultations, Kyn, Fithriyyah and Max advocated for explicit protections for vulnerable groups, including women, children, Indigenous Peoples, LGBTQIA+ individuals and environmental human rights defenders.
Several other Working Group members were unwilling to include such language. There wasn’t a genuine counterargument to their proposition: their voices were blatantly disregarded as a wishlist. And when the youth was unfairly dismissed, few other members supported them or challenged the discrimination publicly.
“Whatever we said, we were just seen as being loud and disruptive,” Kyn shared. “We had come to the table to protect human environmental rights, but we left feeling traumatized and exhausted. There is not enough empathy in the room for the people this policy means to protect,” she asserted.
At the heart of these frustrations lies the dynamics between youth and more senior policymakers. Despite the technical skills and lived experiences young advocates brought, they were not taken seriously because of their age.
This dismissal of youth reflects challenges in policymaking spaces like ASEAN, where institutional resistance to progressive change is often driven by entrenched hierarchies and vested interests.
For Kyn, Fithriyyah and Max, while a regional policy cannot cover every detail, recognizing vulnerable people and groups like LGBTQIA+ and Indigenous Peoples, is essential for advancing environmental rights. This is not about special privileges; it is about addressing historical and structural injustices. However, some Working Group members viewed these efforts as too ambitious or problematic.
What started as a hopeful opportunity turned into a sour disappointment. Kyn, Fithriyyah and Max saw principles essential to environmental justice being debated and removed from the declaration draft.
But they persisted. The team conducted thorough research and sharpened their negotiation tactics. Committed to public engagement, they used their savings from the Daily Subsistence Allowance, which they received to participate in Working Group meetings, to fund consultations with youth across the region.
Realizing that the Working Group lacks representation of Indigenous Peoples, a major stakeholder in environmental rights, they fought to invite Indigenous youth as observers. This resulted in the first-ever Indigenous representation in the Working Group meetings.
The team continues to work with civil society organizations within the Working Group to call for stronger protection for groups in vulnerable situations.
Kyn, Fithriyyah and Max remain firm and passionate advocates for rights and justice. They cling on to stubborn optimism and stay resolute in improving the lives and rights of the 673 million population in ASEAN. Their experiences show that youth is a powerful force in the fight for environmental justice.
“Governments are still far from meaningful engagement with civil society groups, but because we exist, we continue to resist,” Kyn believes.
Youth engagement cannot be symbolic. Inviting young people to be part of the decision-making process is a welcome first step. But this must be followed by a genuine willingness to listen and respect their voices as equal partners with expertise and capacity.
ASEAN’s leaders must recognize this if they are to safeguard the future they claim to protect. Failure to do so will have detrimental impacts on young people and the very goals of the environmental rights agenda that regional governments claim to promote.
“Young people are not passive victims. We are doctors, lawyers and scientists. There may be a lot of trepidation when we talk to government officials and state representatives as a young person. But when we fight for something bigger than ourselves, we lose that fear and grow our belief in what matters,” asserted Max Han.
Perspective / Representatives of Indigenous Peoples’ organizations and partners gathered to deliberate on the draft text of the ASEAN Declaration on Environmental Rights.
Perspective / Ridhi Saluja highlights that nature-based solutions in the Mekong Region need to be inclusive of diverse perspectives.
Feature / Explore how to build climate resilience through evidence-based policy with Pichamon Yeophantong on SEI Asia’s podcast, Environment and Policy in Asia.
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