On Friday, 12 August 2016, as part of the United Nations International Youth Day, the Young Australians Plan for the Planet program will be launched at Questacon, Canberra in a Q&A style event from 5pm to 8pm. The panel will consist of six members representing a range of youth perspectives and will be chaired by an ABC presenter, Lish Fejer. The audience will be invited from regional primary and secondary schools, universities, and the general public.

Why the Young Australians Plan for the Planet? In 2016 the United Nations launched the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) as the framework to ‘end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all.’ The Young Australians Plan for the Planet enables promotion and delivery of these SDG’s throughout Australia utilising an innovative national extra curriculum schools program.

Why use the Plan for the Planet approach? The Plan for the Planet approach has been developed to leverage the effectiveness of business planning and management principles to achieve sustainable outcomes at local, regional and global levels.

Why a national schools program? The Plan for the Planet approach has been adopted to deliver the UN SDG’s based on its integration of science, mathematics and geography, and focus on leveraging business management, leadership and teamwork principles to develop and deliver local, regional and globally sustainable outcomes.

What does the Young Australians Plan for the Planet Program involve? The Australian pilot program will operate as an extra curriculum program involving 20 schools across Australia. Each school will develop a sustainable development plan for their regional EcoZone to 2050. The schools will then work to combine their individual EcoZone plans into a national sustainable development plan – the Young Australians Plan for the Planet (Aust) – which will be presented to the Australian Prime Minister in August 2017.

Who will be involved? 20 schools will be selected across Australia with one school representing each EcoZone, covering all major Australian cities and regional areas. Each school will select twelve Year 10 Students and 3 teachers to build their plan and work with all other schools to integrate these regional plans into the National Plan.

How will the program move forward beyond the pilot? The program and website is being developed to be replicable and scalable beyond Australia – allowing the approach to be adopted by other countries in the region and globally. The potential outcome over a 3-year period is a global Plan for the Planet to achieve global sustainable development to 2050 based on the successful delivery of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and beyond.

The launch is supported by Questacon, the Foundation for Young Australians, Future Earth Australia, the United Nations Information Centre for Australia (UNIC), Inspiring Australia, The Australian National University (ANU), the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and University of Technology Sydney (UTS).