In his opening statement, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon encouraged participants to be “global citizens” and to help the Organizations rise to the challenges such as insecurity, climate change and unemployment by finding their own mission in life.

“Be part of creating a new vision. It is not only about telling us what kind of world you want. It is about partnering with us to realize a better future,” he told participants at the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Youth Forum in New York.

The forum’s theme focuses on leveraging science, technology, innovation and culture to improve societies. Participants are ‘tomorrow’s innovators’, including youth representatives from Member States, students and young entrepreneurs with science and technology backgrounds and youth-led non-governmental organizations.

Ban noted that working with youth is one of his top priorities because “young leaders have the energy and ideas we need to change our world.”

He stressed the essential role of education, adding a personal note about the power of education as he was growing up in the Republic of Korea.

“When we give children and youth the education they deserve, they will help transform the world,” he said. He also noted his new initiative, Education First, a $1.5 billion initiative to achieve universal education.

Also speaking at the opening of the forum, ECOSOC President Néstor Osorio reiterated the need to overcome obstacles on education and employment, particularly among women and girls.

Young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults and more than 75 million youth worldwide are looking for work, according to the UN International Labour Organization (ILO). In Europe and the Middle East, more than half of 15 to 24 year olds are without jobs.

Osorio noted the new opportunities for young entrepreneurs through start-up companies in arts, technology and advertising businesses.

Social networking sites, he noted, played an important role in promoting the so-called Arab Spring by “giving the youth a voice and making them an important player in the transformation of the region.” In addition, mobile phones are pushing development by allowing users to browse the Internet and transfer money wirelessly.

“Young people need economic opportunity. Young people want the full enjoyment of their political and civil rights and freedoms. Speaking their minds; participating in politics; practicing the religion of their choice; and living their lives without any form of discrimination are some of their legitimate aspirations,” Mr. Osorio said.

“Meaningful participation, openness, inclusion and accountability can be improved by using technology, science, and culture. They all can serve as a vital engine for positive change,” he added.

Among the youth addressing participants was 15-year-old World Food Programme Youth Representative Adora Svitak, who encouraged young people to change history with their tremendous audacity and imagination.

Some people think kids and power is a dangerous combination, Ms. Svitak said, “but the only danger is transformational change.”

She said young people are instrumental in supporting and encouraging their peers, and creating change online by toppling regimes and shifting attitudes.

Also, the Secretary-General’s Envoy for Youth, Ahmad Alhendawi, said that engaging young people in addressing global challenges is important because they are at the very fore in both using and developing tools in the field of science, technology and innovation.

“Young people are engines of growth and human development,” he said in a statement.

In a plan for change outlined by Ban, the Youth Envoy’s role encompassed four principles: participation, advocacy, partnerships and harmonization.

Fully endorsing the plan, Mr. Ban encouraged young people to communicate with the UN through the meeting places and cyberspace, such as by following the UN on Twitter (@UN) and to tweet the Envoy directly at @AhmadAlhendawi.

Meanwhile, ECOSOC is today launching a major online campaign, ‘Innovate Your Future.’ The online forum allows youth between the ages of 15 and 40 to write in their ideas and thoughts on how science, technology, innovation and culture can help shape a sustainable world.

For example, one person suggests “to come up with a solar-powered irrigation system” while another advocates “designing homes that consume less power.”

The concerns and recommendations brought forward on the site, along with the ideas from today’s forum, will be presented at the ECOSOC High-level Segment in Geneva this July for ministers from Member States.

“If the proposed coordination mechanism was in place, then at minimum it would have allowed for more observation and better understanding and education of the population on what to expect rather than having a surprise effect with people not knowing what was happening,” Sergio Camacho, Chairman of the Action Team on Near-Earth Objects of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), said at a press conference in Vienna.

Mr. Camacho’s team, also known as Action Team 14, recommended the formation of an International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), which would pool together the expertise of the world’s many existing scientific agencies and organizations to discover and track objects and generate early warnings of potential impacts.

It also recommended forming advisory groups for disaster mitigation and for combining the technological resources of all space-faring nations to develop protocols that may include collision-prevention missions.

The group emphasized the value of finding hazardous near-earth objects, or NEOs, as soon as possible in order to better understand their orbits. This would help to avoid unnecessary NEO “threat mitigation missions” should it be deemed necessary, it said.

Near-Earth objects made headlines last Friday, with not only the meteor impact in the Russian region of Chelyabinsk, but also given the fly-by – on the same day – of an asteroid, widely described as being the size of an office building, that passed within 17,200 miles (27,000 kilometres) of Earth.

However, UNOOSA has long been preoccupied with the issue, given the potential devastation of an object that size hitting the Earth and the enormous resources required to prevent a collision if the need arises.

“Already in 1995, UNOOSA organized the United Nations International Conference on Near-Earth Objects in New York to sensitize Member States about the potential threat of near-Earth objects, given the global consequences of their impact,” Mazlan Othman, Director of UNOOSA, said at today’s press conference.

Action Team 14 was established in 2001 by the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), in response to recommendation 14 of the Third UN Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNISPACE III) that was held in Vienna in 1999.

The team has been mandated to review ongoing efforts in the field of NEOs, identify gaps that could be filled by coordination and propose steps for such coordination in collaboration with specialized bodies.

The team is currently discussing their recommendations in the framework of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. The recommendations are expected to be adopted during the Subcommittee’s current session, which ends Friday, and then endorsed by the Committee itself during its session in June.

According to the team, an agreement by that date should still prove valuable. “No object larger than a kilometre is expected to pose a threat to Earth in the next few hundred years,” according to one of today’s briefers, Lindley Johnson, Executive of the Near Earth Object Observation Program of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

“Women tend to be overrepresented in the humanities and social sciences, and underrepresented in science and technology,” said an official from the world body’s International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Bureau for Workers’ Activities, Claude Akpokavie. “Measures need to be put in place to redress this imbalance.”

According to ILO, the gap between men and women in the scientific and technological fields is linked to pervasive gender roles and attitudes in different societies – visible in both developed and developing countries – which encourage girls to pursue ‘softer’ subjects.

Over the past few months, recent stories have emerged revealing stark gender discrepancies in a number of countries around the world, which are hindering women’s participation in science and technology both at school and at work, the agency noted.

In the United States, for example, a Yale University study found that women science graduates are discriminated against when applying for research posts. In Iran, the Government recently announced that women will be excluded from a wide range of university studies, including nuclear physics and electrical engineering. In China, several universities require women to obtain higher entry grades than men for science courses.

“Girls are far less likely than boys to study engineering or computer or physical sciences,” said the Director of ILO’s Bureau for Gender Equality, Jane Hodges. “Stereotypes of girls represent them as less interested or capable in certain subjects – such as mathematics and science. This inevitably reduces their access to jobs with better pay or labour markets that may offer better opportunities.”

However, when encouraged, girls do excel in scientific subjects, she added.

With an estimated 500 million people entering the global workforce over the next decade, Ms. Hodges stressed that it is crucial that women in science and technology jobs are not left working at the lowest levels.

“Even though women hold more than 60 per cent of information and communication technology-related jobs in OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, only 10 to 20 per cent are computer programmers, engineers, systems analysts or designers,” she said. “Education and skills training – and a change in attitudes – are vital to ensure women are not left behind.”