UNESCO, IRDR, the Horizon Initiative and other institutions jointly launched the "Youth Innovations on Climate Actions and Disaster Risk Reduction," supported by the China Youth Development Foundation and Mercedes-Benz Star Fund. This report is based on three hackathons held between 2023 and 2025. With the theme of "Empowering Youth for a Healthy Planet," these hackathons mobilized over 200,000 young people and gathered more than 100 high-quality projects, some of which were showcased internationally.

Aligned with IRDR’s interdisciplinary research orientation, the projects cover four categories including scientific inventions, technical solutions, policy recommendations and youth action plans, focusing on key areas such as agricultural emission reduction and carbon sequestration, ecosystem restoration and intelligent disaster prevention. They integrate cutting-edge technologies like AI and blockchain with traditional wisdom, and have been applied in real scenarios such as urban greening and disaster early warning.

Over the three years, the activity has nurtured a number of benchmark projects. The 2023 "Plan-T Green Project" relied on independently developed planting substrates and industrialized production systems, increasing the per mu yield of vegetables to 6 times that of traditional planting and reducing facility costs by 80%, with large-scale bases established in Nantong, Jiangsu Province. The 2024 "Heatstroke Risk Early Warning Device" provided low-cost, high-precision warnings for outdoor workers based on multi-source data and heat index models, obtaining 4 national patents. The 2025 "Urban Flood Control Radar System" integrated multi-source data to build prediction models, realizing 24-hour flood prediction and real-time early warning, and significantly improving the disaster response efficiency of urban infrastructure.

IRDR has always been committed to building a bridge between youth innovation and DRR practice. In the future, it will continue to incubate high-quality projects and expand their global influence through international cooperation, providing replicable and promotable youth-driven solutions for advancing the implementation of Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction the UN Sustainable Development Goals.