LocationsHow youth innovation is shaping climate resilience in Northern Kazakhstan
December 8, 2025
Urban resilience is often described through infrastructure, modelling systems and policy frameworks. Yet the most striking insights sometimes emerge in places where people work with limited resources but a strong understanding of their local environment. The recent Urbathon in North Kazakhstan was a powerful reminder that youth-led ideas can reveal gaps and possibilities that formal systems tend to overlook and offer scalable, tech-enabled solutions.
Over two days, forty teams explored how to strengthen the Petropavlovsk city’s capacity to anticipate and respond to climate-related risks, especially flooding. This city is no stranger to climate-related risks. Located near the Ishim River, Petropavlovsk regularly experiences spring floods driven by rapid snowmelt and river overflow. The 2024 flood became Kazakhstan’s largest in the past 80 years and lasted for nearly two months, affecting multiple regions and exposing critical gaps in early warning and urban drainage systems. As of 17 April 2024, nearly 2,500 homes in the North Kazakhstan Region were flooded, with over 1,000 of them located in Petropavlovsk. Thousands of people lost their homes and belongings, and around 14,500 residents were evacuated from the region’s settlements.
One insight from Urbathon was particularly clear: when young teams map risks, they rarely think in administrative or hierarchical categories. They think in terms of movement, proximity, daily routines and lived experience. Flood risks, for them, are not something defined by a boundary of responsibility. They are defined by how water actually behaves in neighbourhoods, yards and micro-basins around the city, and how it affects them and their families. This perspective is often missing in traditional planning processes.
Another trend that stood out was how naturally young participants used digital tools. Data, sensors and AI were presented as everyday tools for problem solving. For many participants, digital thinking is not a technical skill but a default mode of understanding the world, much like calculators or Excel spreadsheets for earlier generations. This shift fundamentally changes the design quality and smoothness of the solutions they propose.
Gender inclusivity also emerged as a strength. Many teams included young women in technical and design roles, underlining the importance of inclusive innovation ecosystems for building resilience that reflects diverse needs.
During the refinement sessions, I introduced UNDP’s Digital Standards Framework. It was interesting to see how participants adapted their ideas once they saw the value of testing scalability, data flows, user experience and practical constraints. Several teams shifted their concepts from awareness campaigns to tangible prototypes after realizing how important measurability and operational logic are for resilience solutions.
Thirteen teams were selected for incubation, where they will strengthen their prototypes and prepare for the opportunity to apply for up to US$ 50,000 in funding from project donors supported by the Government of Japan. This stage helps transform creativity into concrete implementation pathways, with budgets and plans, something many early-stage teams rarely have access to.
The top three projects captured the diversity of what local resilience can look like. EcoStars proposed “Zhasyl Mektep,” a school-based ecosystem model designed to build environmental literacy through hands-on micro-experiments. Urbio created custom sensors and a predictive mapping tool that generates personalised safe routes based on air quality, lighting, ice formation and flood risks. And the first-place team, a group of students from the Nazarbayev Intellectual School, presented a simple but effective prototype for neighbourhood-level flood alerts using local water-level sensors and an online platform. It fills a crucial monitoring gap that large systems do not reach.
What I understood from this Urbathon is that youth-driven solutions often challenge our assumptions about scale. Many of the ideas are small, but they operate exactly where resilience is formed: in the spaces where people live, move and make decisions. They respond to local risks, which are dynamic and often invisible to central systems. This bottom-up precision is something that urban planning still struggles to integrate.
Youth innovation does not replace formal systems, but it complements them with speed, creativity and lived-experience intelligence. And in the context of climate adaptation, where risks evolve faster than institutions, this combination becomes essential.
If urban resilience is about anticipating the next shock rather than reacting to the last one, then engaging young innovators is not optional. It is a necessary part of building cities that can adapt in real time.
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