Open Letter from the Youth of Vietnam on the “Just” Energy Transition

World leaders are currently meeting in Baku for the 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference to discuss how to turn climate commitments into action at a faster pace. As the largest source of CO2 emissions, the energy sector is the main topic on the COP agenda. Meanwhile, young people, along with other stakeholders, are at the forefront of the fight for a more efficient and effective energy transition, engaging in collective action that seeks to ensure the »just« is not forgotten in the process. As an emerging economy in Southeast Asia, Vietnam has high energy consumption levels and power demands. However, the country is also committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 and is one of the main countries to have joined the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) mechanism. So what role to Vietnam’s youth play in this transition?

96.6 per cent of young people in Vietnam want to engage more effectively in JETP

Since 2021, a large number of programmes supporting youth engagement in the just energy transition have been launched in Vietnam, including Green Youth Labs (GYL), Sustainable Energy for Youth (SE4Y), NextGen and others. Of these, Green Youth Labs—a project initiated by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung—is one of the largest, supporting more than 540 young people over the three years of its implementation from 2021 to 2024 and funding 33 youth-led initiatives on the just energy transition. Youth initiatives targeted several different groups in the community, including students, children, artists, households, people living in poverty and ethnic minorities. These initiatives also took different forms, including education, communication, artwork, technical solutions and research. At the end of the GYL project, 11 youth alumni gathered young people’s views from within the programme and beyond and set them out in an Open Letter to bring to COP29, sharing young people’s challenges and demands in the context of Vietnam’s energy transition.

Young people’s challenges in achieving a just energy transition

What are the obstacles faced by young people implementing local energy transition initiatives? There are three main challenges: (1) finance, (2) human resources and (3) approval. Youth projects usually have limited funding as complying with reimbursement procedures is difficult. Young people are often students or recent graduates using their own money to kick-start their project while waiting to be reimbursed by donors when they finish the project. They also lack the skills and knowledge to follow financial regulations, sometimes failing to collect the necessary receipts, which makes reimbursement even more difficult. At the same time, young people are normally working as unpaid volunteers in their project so the commitment of team members varies depending on the self-discipline and priorities of each individual. This makes the team leaders’ job even harder, especially given their young age, as they are required to manage a team with a wide range of skills and interests. Even if a project has solid funding and a good staff team, seeking project approval from the local government is another barrier preventing their efforts from bearing fruit. Informal youth groups which are not legally registered organisations find it risky and unsafe to seek out legal protection from partners and local authorities.

Obstacles faced by vulnerable and marginalized youth groups

What about vulnerable and marginalized youth groups, representing people with disabilities, those living in remote areas and ethnic minorities, for instance? For these groups, the idea of running a local »energy transition« initiative is alien—they do not even have access to the information that would enable them to understand what it means. The reasons for this are lack of access to the internet, being located a long way from energy transition capacity-building programmes, language and interpretation barriers. Addressing these challenges would mean lifting the barriers to a »just« energy transition.

Demands for more sustainable youth actions

In conclusion, the Open Letter from the young people of Vietnam calls for actions and support from among the youth community itself, as well as from other stakeholders, including governments, academia, non-governmental organisations and the private sector. The letter calls for all these actors to address the challenges together, with the aim of more meaningful engagement and a fair transition for young people, not only in Vietnam but around the world, in the clean-energy race. This Open Letter echoes other youth voices from around the world and calls for the COP29 to facilitate youth actions, to coordinate youth contributions so that they can work in synergy to address global climate change issues.  

For more information on the last Green Youth Labs Energy Summit, please visit asia.fes.de