Deadline: June 30, 2025
Applications are open for the Taiwan OCA/GEEP Youth Innovation Challenge 2025. The Youth Innovation Challenge invites applicants from 15 to 30 years of age to propose a solution to address marine issues, including conservation, biodiversity, and marine debris. Solutions can incorporate a variety of approaches but must include environmental education. Solutions must be innovative, feasible, and informed by research.
Proposed solutions should use environmental education (EE) as a key strategy. EE provides the skills, values, attitudes, and behaviors that encourage individuals and groups to be thoughtful and engaged changemakers. As a key part of your solution, EE can help ensure that solutions are focused on empowering long-term change within a community.
Benefits
Winning solutions receive:
- global recognition.
- a $1,000 USD prize.
- a 2-day trip to Kaohsiung, Taiwan to attend the YIC award ceremony September 29–30, 2025.
Eligibility
The Youth Innovation Challenge is intended for young leaders and innovators aged 15–30. Your innovative solutions must provide a solution to one of the following key areas, using environmental education as a key component:
- Marine biodiversity and conservation: Managing, protecting, and/or restoring marine biodiversity for its ecological, cultural, economic, and other values.
- Marine debris: Reducing and/or mitigating the effects of marine debris, including the monitoring, clean up, and recycling of marine debris, and educating communities about how to address these issues.
- Public-private collaboration: Collaborating between the private sector, governments, and the public to protect marine environments. This might include ideas for cooperation between government and corporations to fulfill corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals, civic engagement opportunities for the public to engage with government programs, and other initiatives that foster collaboration between public and private sectors.
Application
Applications are due in Submittable by June 30, 2025 at 11:59 PM U.S. Eastern Time (find your time zone).
For more information, visit YIC.
