UN Volunteers in BeijingAt China’s International Center for Economic and Technical Exchanges (CICETE), Jialin is a young Chinese UN Volunteer Project Analyst with UNOSSC. She organizes trainings, reviews grant proposals, and drafts policy briefs that drive sustainable development in agriculture, clean energy, and poverty reduction. 

Haoming connects the dots from there to his volunteer journey as a fully funded UN Volunteer. He adds, "Through this graduate work, I realized that environmental issues are deeply intertwined with public health, economic behaviour, and social development.

As a student of economic statistics at Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, Hubei province, Wu vividly recalls coming across the United Nations Volunteers (UNV) recruitment notice in May 2024. Without hesitation, she applied.  "I've always been passionate about volunteering and want to make a positive impact," she explained. This passion was evident throughout her university years. For three years, Wu was an active member of a public welfare committee, organizing and overseeing more than 15 volunteer events.

With a background in Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics, Deanna sees her volunteer assignment with the United Nations as a platform for meaningful contribution to sustainability—something she's been passionately pursuing as part of her university studies as well.   I consolidate climate vulnerability and disaster risk data from diverse UN entities and development partners into a unified platform, thus enhancing data accessibility and improving urban planning and decision-making processes.” Yi Nam Xu, UN Volunteer with UN-Habitat.

Xiaerbati was part of a team that provided vocational training and entrepreneurship opportunities to women from rural areas in Qinghai Province. These opportunities made it easy to access renewable energy, boosting agricultural productivity and mitigating climate change. “Volunteerism plays a pivotal role in fostering long-term economic empowerment of women by creating sustainable support systems and fostering community resilience,” says Xiaerbati.

UN Volunteers from China have contributed to UN programmes on poverty reduction, environmental protection, and other areas within China and across the globe. In 2024, 234 Chinese nationals served as UN Volunteers, 85 of whom were fully funded by China.In 2019, UNV and CYVA signed the first Fully Funded Programme Partnership to facilitate international assignments of UN Volunteers from China.

Marking the 50th anniversary of the 1972 Stockholm Conference, the theme of this year’s World Environment Day “Only One Earth” calls for collective and transformative change, highlighting the need to live sustainably in harmony through climate action. As the resources of our planet is limited, no one is spared from the impact of environmental degradation.

Olga Tsaplina has joined UN-Habitat in Kenya as a Junior Officer for sustainable urbanization in August 2020. She has a background in political science and international relations and studied in Russia and Germany. UN-Habitat Human Rights and Social Inclusion Unit is responsible for the inclusion of the vulnerable urban population groups into programming and various other activities of the agency. Olga has been supporting the unit on several workstreams like developing the project documents, concept notes, reports and sometimes weekly event publications.