A paper leak can derail an examination. A climate crisis can derail an entire generation. The first demands accountability in an education system. The second demands not resignation but redesigning the systemic transformation of almost every system that education prepares young people to enter.

This is not to compare the seriousness of a paper leak with a heatwave, flood or wildfire. It is to recognise something deeper: today’s young people are inheriting multiple crises at once and we are still educating them largely for yesterday’s world.

As the world marks International Youth Day, the contrast could hardly be sharper. Young people are studying, competing for jobs and demanding integrity in education while simultaneously watching their future being reshaped by extreme heat, floods, wildfires, water stress and climate disruption. The World Meteorological Organization has warned that the developing El Niño could henceforth in remaining 2026 increase the likelihood of heatwaves, droughts, heavy rainfall and other extreme events .

The question, therefore, is no longer whether young people should be involved in tackling climate change. The question is whether we are giving them the institutions, skills and opportunity to do so. That is why an important new partnership is being announced on 13 August.

The Green TERRE Foundation (GTF), initiator of the Smart Campus Cloud Network (SCCN), and YOUNGO Energy, the energy-focused working group of YOUNGO, the official youth constituency of the UNFCCC, have initiated a unique partnership to advance not only focussing on paper leaks but also energy, water and waste leaks that not only cost to economy  but result in life-threatening climate crisis. 

They together have devised University Determined Contributions (UDCs), mirroring NDCs ( Nationally Determined Contributions) and will launch a global movement to engage Gen Z from universities and higher education institutes.

Unfailing-resolve and fully-demonstrated potential of Gen Z would be now channelled to meet the existential crisis of climate change.

The Missing Link in Climate Implementation

The Paris Agreement gave the world a powerful mechanism: Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs.  Countries determine their climate ambitions. But ambitions become real only when they are translated into measurable implementation starting with sketching road-map,  taking decisions, deploying technologies, making investments, developing skills and behaviour through experiential learning. The implementation gap is not only a financing gap or a technology gap. Increasingly, it is a human-capital gap.

Who will measure emissions? Who will design Net-Zero buildings? Who will manage renewable-energy systems? Who will plan climate-resilient cities? Who will develop carbon-accounting systems? Who will use AI and digital technologies responsible for climate solutions? Who will help communities adapt to heat, floods and water stress?

The answer cannot come from governments alone. Nor can it come from industry alone. It must come from the institutions that produce the next generation of engineers, scientists, managers, architects, lawyers, entrepreneurs, policymakers and community leaders that later get connected to government and the business.

With hundreds of millions of students and enormous research capacity, universities are among the world's most underused climate infrastructures. Walking the talk of Net Zero is economically beneficial as amply proved by Solar Energy and has potential in the world of AI and digital infrastructure to become a reality of full employment of  the youth including in business and government and even leaders in start-ups. This exactly is the premise behind UDCs.

From NDCs to UDCs

A Nationally Determined Contribution says, in effect: this is what our country intends to do. A University Determined Contribution asks: what will our university actually do, and what will its students learn and get skilled by doing it?

The UDC concept was developed by GTF within SCCN and proposes a voluntary, structured framework through which universities define, implement, measure and periodically strengthen climate commitments aligned with NDCs, the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. It was first proposed in virtual-COP organised by YOUNGO Energy in 2025 just before COP30 in Belem in  Brazil. Ovais Sarmad , mentor of GTF/SCCN and former Executive Secretary of UNFCCC proposed it in V-COP and was agreed.

A UDC could begin with a greenhouse-gas inventory and a Net-Zero roadmap for universities . It could then encompass renewable energy, energy efficiency, sustainable mobility, water conservation, waste reduction, biodiversity and climate resilience. But stopping there would fall short and miss the real opportunity. The most valuable asset on a campus is not its solar panels or green buildings. It is the young human-mind , the enormous potential of Gen Z .  A UDC therefore places experiential learning at the heart of implementation.

An engineering student can audit campus energy use. An architecture student can design cool spaces to deal with extreme heat. Innovators can start-up for passive cooling to reduce investment . A business student can explore climate finance. A computer-science student can build digital monitoring tools for real-time and online measurement . A law student can study climate governance. Students from agriculture, health, economics and social sciences can work on adaptation, food systems, public health and community resilience. The campus indeed is a living laboratory. The student becomes not merely a recipient of climate knowledge, but a climate practitioner. That is the shift we urgently need.

Gen Z Needs a Mission

Young people have already demonstrated that they can mobilise society and shake the system. They  can also influence climate discourse. YOUNGO itself is recognised by the UNFCCC as the official game-changing constituency, providing a channel through which young ones contribute technical and policy inputs and participate in climate processes. 

But advocacy alone cannot deliver Net-Zero.   The ambition should not be to create a collection of isolated “green campuses”. Here comes SCCN as a catalyst to create a network of learning campuses.

A university in India should be able to learn from one in Africa. A Latin American campus should be able to adapt an innovation developed in Asia. Universities should be able to compare pathways, learn from failures, share data and accelerate solutions. This is where SCCN can play a distinctive role with its 640+ campuses in 24 countries in Africa, Latin America, India and China.

Its purpose is not simply to make campuses greener. It is to connect campuses so that green skills, climate solutions and implementation experience travel faster than the climate crisis itself.The proposed Global University Climate Action Platform could eventually provide an institutional home for such learning, allowing universities to register UDCs voluntarily, report progress, exchange experience and build partnerships for technology and climate finance.

If we give young people campuses that function as living laboratories, real problems to solve, real data to analyse, real technologies to test, real communities to serve and real pathways into decision-making, they will give us something far more valuable than another generation of climate advocates.They can give us a generation of climate implementers.

And perhaps that is how we move from paper leaks to climate breakthroughs, from an education system that prepares young people to pass examinations to an Earth Generation prepared to pass the planet on, intact, to those who come after them.

(The author is a noted environmentalist, former Director of UNEP, Coordinating Lead Author, IPCC 2007 (Nobel Peace Prize laureate), IIT alumnus, and Founder of the Green TERRE Foundation, Pune. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at shende.rajendra@gmail.com)