On the 13th of April, The Youth Café, in collaboration with African Wildlife Foundation (AWF), will launch a Sino-Africa Youth Dialogue themed Environmental Protection in Africa With The Youth Action, a "Design for Peace" Global Peace Initiative that emphasizes empowering young people to see and act on global sustainability challenges across geographies and cultures. The event aims to enhance participants' awareness of environmental issues in Africa, inspire youth to come up with environmental solutions, and build connections between the public and the practitioners in the workshop.

The Youth Café wishes to invite young minds to contribute a diverse pool of perspectives on issues heavily affecting the African continent in an upcoming workshop, "Envisioning "One Health" for the future: aligning human, animal and planetary health," taking place on 4 April at 6.30 pm (CET), through which the focus will be on "One Health" and three phenomena it aims at preventing and addressing: zoonoses (diseases spreading from animals to humans), antimicrobial resistance (AMR), as well as food safety and security threats.

Global emissions are reaching record levels and show no sign of peaking. The last four years were the four hottest on record, and winter temperatures in the Arctic have risen by 3°C since 1990. Sea levels are rising, coral reefs are dying, and we are starting to see the life-threatening impact of climate change on health, through air pollution, heatwaves and risks to food security.

The impacts of climate change are being felt everywhere and are having very real consequences on people’s lives. Climate change is disrupting national economies, costing us dearly today and even more tomorrow. But there is a growing recognition that affordable, scalable solutions are available now that will enable us all to leapfrog to cleaner, more resilient economies.

The latest analysis shows that if we act now, we can reduce carbon emissions within 12 years and hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C and even, as asked by the latest science, to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

Thankfully, we have the Paris Agreement – a visionary, viable, forward-looking policy framework that sets out exactly what needs to be done to stop climate disruption and reverse its impact. But the agreement itself is meaningless without ambitious action.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres is calling on all leaders to come to New York on 23 September with concrete, realistic plans to enhance their nationally determined contributions by 2020, in line with reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 45 per cent over the next decade, and to net zero emissions by 2050.