My name is Jake Romani Backhouse, a youth activist and youth policy maker who has been involved in the youth advocacy space for some time now. I am very much involved in the Climate Change mitigation project in South Africa. I am a member of the South African Institute Youth Policy Committee and sit on the Global Change focal point committee where we handle global and regional issues. The global change focal point of which I am a member currently serves as a youth advisory board to the Presidential Climate Commission. I was a delegate to the 2022 SAIIA Young Leaders Conference where we drafted our declaration that was handed over to government, UNICEF, diplomatic corps, and civil society representatives at a high-level event in Pretoria on the 14th of July 2022 where climate change mitigation issues featured high on the agenda and in the declaration.

I was also a facilitator for the COP27 South African Youth Statement as well as a member of the drafting committee. 

I am a member of the Junior City Council of the City of Cape Town where I actively put forward topics of climate change for debate in council and draft proposals to the City of Cape Town administration in terms of policy proposals that relate to climate change, especially in the form of biodiversity as well as transportation. I have also worked on several of the Model United Nations Programmes at SAIIA. 

I am also a member of Youth Capital which is a policy advisory and discussion group consisting of youth representatives from around the country that put together draft submissions on legislation currently being processed in Parliament through Parliament's stakeholder engagement programs. A lot of the proposals that we make relate to climate change.