“Young people in Hong Kong have missed so many important educational opportunities over the past two years with school closures and extracurricular activity cancellations, so the HK SDG Summit has provided a new opportunity for community engagement, education and collaboration in these uncertain times,” he said.

Highlights from the event included a keynote presentation from Sonalie Figueiras, the founder of Green Queen, as well as Forbes’ “30 Under 30 Asia” social entrepreneur Melati Wijsen, who co-founded the youth empowerment project Youthopia. Expert panel discussions and workshops featured some of Hong Kong’s most prominent NGOs, including the Crossroads Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, the ITS Foundation, Christian Action and Feeding Hong Kong.

“The SDG Summit and other similar events are incredibly important as they galvanise youth voices. What we need more than ever is youngsters to organise and fight against the lethargy and apathy of previous generations in averting the climate crisis,” said Figueiras.

“The climate crisis is the single biggest threat facing humankind and it affects every aspect of our lives, from food and land to fashion, energy and fertility. On a grass-roots level, we need to build more awareness on how acute the crisis actually is.”

In addition to Youthtopia, the 21-year-old Wijsen has also founded Bye Bye Plastic Bags with her younger sister, and started youth movement One Island One Voice and social enterprise Mountain Mamas. She has given two global TED talks and been named in various media as one of the most influential young women in the world, including Forbes, Time and CNN. She describes herself as a “full-time changemaker and movement builder”.

“I always say that change often starts in the classroom,” Wijsen said. “That is why I am a big fan of events such as the SDG Summit because it brings students together and opens space for real-world discussions. It is so empowering and very exciting to be part of an event like this.”

Even though Wijsen is busy with Youthtopia and many other projects and movements, she believes a key to making a real change is to avoid distraction – especially in a world with a seemingly endless number of crises.

“Focus, focus, focus. That is my daily mantra,” she explained. “It can be so easy to get distracted and think that you can do it all, but we can create more impact when we are aligned and see a vision of change clearly.”

Although the SDG Summit was a youth-oriented conference, it also featured workshops from experienced changemakers and NGO leaders, including Danny Harrington, a Hong Kong-based educator and sustainability teacher and mentor who has worked on running alternative flexible-learning model schools since 1997. He founded ITS Education Asia in 2005 to improve educational access by using non-traditional methods to allow students to gain access to US, UK and International Baccalaureate (IB) education.

He echoed Figueiras’ sentiments on climate change while also touching on issues like income inequality, and explained how the issues are intertwined.

“The way we have developed our economic systems over the last 200 years has created the two crises of wealth inequality and the climate crisis,” Harrington said. “Everything else flows from that. At the grass roots, we need empowerment, funding and facilitating of community groups to identify and solve the issues that they deem most important to them, within a sustainable framework so that we stop the acceptance of negative externalities which blight so many decisions by one group against others.”

He finished off by saying if people were “more kind and less greedy, it would solve a lot of problems”.