Connecting environment, AMR and youth action: meet Sarah Rauzana

2026-10-21

What does plastic pollution, climate change and antimicrobial resistance have in common? As Chairperson of the ASEAN Youth Organization and a member of the Asia Pacific Youth AMR Task Force, Sarah Rauzana sees young people as central to making these connections and turning them into action. In this interview, Sarah talks about why AMR needs to move beyond the health sector, what environmental advocates can bring to the One Health conversation, why vulnerable communities must be at its centre, and how young people across the region can build a lasting movement against AMR.

The link between antimicrobial resistance and the environment

What drew you to take on the challenge of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and how do you see it connecting to your existing work in public health and environment?

– I think what drew me to AMR is the realization that I wasn’t entering a completely new field. I was entering a different part of the much bigger conversation about health, environment, and justice.

– My background is in health, specifically nursing, but professionally I’ve spent the last five to six years working largely on environmental issues such as: plastic pollution, waste, climate, and environmental advocacy and campaigning.

– Through that work, I increasingly saw that environmental problems are never just environmental problems.

– Through my work journey I saw how environmental problems really affect people’s health, livelihoods, access to basic services, and ultimately their quality of life. For example, in the plastic pollution space, people are now talking about how microplastics affect human health. I’ve also been digging into heat-related issues, trying to connect the lifecycle of plastics to the heat impacts on human health.

– And now there’s AMR, which I think made the connections even clearer for me. I know AMR is partly driven by overuse and misuse of medicines in humans, but it’s also driven by poor hygiene and sanitation and lack of access to clean water, which are clearly connected to environmental issues. I don’t know of many environmental organizations that are already talking about AMR and how it connects to environmental issues.

– I think that’s something new we can explore, how we can connect with environmental groups and get them supporting the AMR narrative, at least on social media, so more people understand that AMR isn’t only a health issue, but an environmental one too.

As the Chairperson of the ASEAN Youth Organization (AYO), an ASEAN Prize-winning institution, you carry immense experience in mobilizing youth.

How does it feel to step into this new regional collective with the Asia Pacific Youth AMR Task Force?

– Honestly,  I think this is a great opportunity for me to learn new things, and a great opportunity for AYO as an organization to tap into sectors we haven’t worked in before. As an organization, we don’t focus on one specific sector, we’re committed to the ASEAN Secretariat’s youth-related agenda through the ASEAN Work Plan on Youth, which covers pretty much everything, almost like the SDGs but at the regional level.

– We’re one of the largest youth organizations in Southeast Asia, so we can try to support youth across the region, and hopefully beyond, since we also have team members from non-ASEAN countries.

– As an organization, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to connect young people across ASEAN around issues that matter to them, and honestly, AMR hadn’t come up as one of those topics before.

– So it’s amazing that ReAct Asia Pacific is now involving ASEAN organizations in this agenda. Joining this Task Force feels like taking our experience into a new issue, and into a much broader regional community.

– What excites me most is that I’m not coming into this Task Force as an AMR technical expert. I’m not an expert at all, I’m still learning.

– I think that’s actually the value of having a diverse collective like this: it brings together people from different sectors and countries.

– I hope I can contribute the perspective of youth mobilization, environmental advocacy, communications, and regional cooperation, while staying very open to learning from the health professionals and AMR experts in the group.

From an environmental advocacy perspective, what unique angles or blind spots do you think environmental advocates can bring to the AMR conversation?

– I think one of the biggest contributions environmental advocates and organizations can bring is helping people look upstream. A lot of AMR conversations focus on what happens inside hospitals or with existing patients, which is extremely important. But, environmental advocates, at least at Dietplastik Indonesia, the organization I work with, often ask a slightly different question: where are the systems and practices creating the conditions for the problem in the first place?

– Even within the environmental movement, a lot of organizations focus only on waste management: how to manage waste that already exists. My organization focuses more on preventing the waste itself, and my experience in the waste sector has taught me that what happens after we consume something is just as important as what happens before. I think that perspective is very relevant to AMR.

– At the same time, environmental advocates need to be careful not to oversimplify the science. Not many environmental organizations are familiar with the One Health concept yet, so it’s important for those who already understand it to engage more with environmental activists and organizations about it, because those conversations can lead back to AMR and help more people understand it as both a health and an environmental issue.

– In Indonesia’s health sector, there’s already a preventive approach compared to relying on medication. If we apply that same lens to environmental issues, I think it’s well aligned with the AMR narrative too.

Ensuring equity and social justice in AMR campaigns

How can youth advocates ensure that equity and justice remain central to regional AMR campaigns?

– I’ve learned that the people who experience the greatest impact are often the people with the least influence over the systems creating those impacts. So, it’s important for us to start treating impacted and vulnerable communities as partners, as the main actors of the movement, not just participants.

– I believe youth can help make campaigns more locally grounded. Not just by translating information into different languages, though that matters too, but by understanding different realities.

– There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. We need to create space for communities to tell us what the problem actually looks like from their perspective.

– For me, equity shouldn’t be an add-on to advocacy, it should be built in from the beginning. Before we do anything, we need to have a dialogue with everyone involved; having every angle represented makes our understanding more comprehensive.

– At AYO, we try to do this through consultation meetings, not only at the regional level but also locally, through our local chapters, because every country has its own approach and situation, and we need to understand what’s actually happening on the ground.

Strategies for turning awareness into real policy

What are some of the most effective strategies you’ve used at AYO to turn “awareness” into actual policy engagement or grassroots action that you hope to bring to the Task Force?

– One thing I’ve learned at AYO is that awareness is only the first step. We need to turn it into actual policy engagement or community-led action.

– What we try to do is create a pathway: from learning, to connecting, to participating, to taking action.

– That’s why we run different types of programs: capacity-building, training, youth exchange, and conferences, and most of our conferences and forums end with policy recommendations that we send to ministries or the ASEAN Secretariat.

– One of the keys is consistency: staying connected with all our beneficiaries, whether that’s participants, ambassadors, or task force members. We don’t want our programs to be one-time events.

– We maintain a WhatsApp group connecting all AYO alumni, a mailing list, and social media, including something we call the “ASEAN Youth Space” on Instagram, essentially a broadcast channel where everyone can share things. It helps our audience feel that what we did before connects to what we’re doing now, rather than treating each event as disconnected.

– We also structure our programs so they build on each other: training and online courses lead into conferences, which lead into policy recommendations, which lead into follow-up with stakeholders like the ASEAN Secretariat or relevant ministries, so we can actually monitor progress.

– Meaningful participation isn’t a one-time event, it needs a proper cycle from training through to monitoring and evaluation.

– I think that strategy such as dividing the team to manage different stakeholders, from fellow youth to ministers to media and maintaining consistent engagement, is something the Task Force could apply too, to track progress from grassroots movement to policy engagement.

Challenges and opportunities of regional diversity

Given the cultural, political, and economic diversity across the region, what do you see as the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity in uniting youth across different countries for this cause?

– Southeast Asia is incredibly diverse politically, economically, culturally, and socially. Even how young people understand healthcare, antibiotics, or advocacy can be very different from one place to another.

– I don’t think our goal should be to make everyone work in exactly the same way. Instead, we need to find common ground while allowing different countries to adapt the approach to their own realities.

– AMR is exactly that kind of issue: bacteria don’t respect national borders, so our response can’t be limited by them either.

– So, the real question is how we can turn our differences into a strength for our narrative, campaigns, and policy efforts to tackle AMR.

This Task Force brings together a highly diverse group of medical, veterinary, pharmaceutical, and policy students and professionals.

How do you envision collaborating with peers from these different sectors (like the IVSA or IFMSA) to co-develop practical capacity-building initiatives?

– The Task Force needs to move beyond simply having different sectors represented in the same room, to actually co-creating across sectors.

– At AYO, our team members already come from different educational and professional backgrounds, so for AMR specifically, I think we could develop a One Health learning model co-created with medical students, pharmacy or public health people, and environmental youth.

– Something where everyone contributes, even if they’re not AMR experts, because their understanding of One Health can also strengthen our AMR initiatives.

– AYO doesn’t currently have people with AMR expertize, but we do have things we can offer such as our networks and our platform.

– We have something called AYO Academy, which works a bit like Coursera, so we could create an online course together and publish it there.

– We could also collaborate with AYO Enviro, our environmental-focused chapter, which could be among the first to go through a One Health learning model developed with, say, ReAct Asia-Pacific, the Task Force, or IVSA.

– Ultimately, I’d like the AMR Task Force to be a space where people know what they, personally or as an organization, can contribute, whether that’s a discipline, a skill, an experience, or a professional position while also understanding what other disciplines are needed.

Targets and policy goals at the ASEAN level

As the Task Force begins shaping its two-year workplan, what is one major milestone or outcome you personally hope the group achieves during its tenure?

– For me, one milestone is building a strong and sustainable youth AMR movement across Southeast Asia and the wider Asia-Pacific region, hopefully one that outlasts the two years.

– That could come from campaigns, capacity-building programs, or policy recommendations, but beyond those outputs, I think the real measure of success is whether we leave behind a stronger ecosystem of young people who understand AMR and feel confident enough to act on it, whether in their universities, communities, organizations, and eventually in policy-making spaces.

– Another milestone I’d like to see on the policy side is AMR being included as one of the agendas in the ASEAN Work Plan on Youth, under the Education, Youth, and Sport Division of the ASEAN Secretariat, specifically in their health and well-being priority area.

– The Secretariat is currently developing the new version of that work plan for 2026 to 2030, and from the draft I’ve seen, they’ve only mentioned mental health, sexual health, and reproductive health under the health-related agenda so far, not AMR yet.

– I’m hoping that when the new work plan is released, AMR will be explicitly included.

Message to young people on climate change and AMR

To close, what is your message to a young person reading this who might care about climate change or health, but doesn’t yet realize how critically AMR affects their future?

– I don’t want young people to see AMR as another huge, scary, global problem that’s impossible to solve, because I believe we can solve it, as long as we do it together.

– Start wherever you are, even if it’s a new topic for you. Learn about it, talk about it, start questioning how antibiotics are used in your community. Bring the conversation to your university, your campus, your organizations, your research, your campaigns, and your social media (personal or organizational).

– I think young people sometimes underestimate the power of connecting issues that are usually discussed separately.

– I’ve seen it work in the tobacco control movement, which isn’t only about health, it also connects to environmental issues and gender equality.

– I think we can, and need to, do the same with AMR. Climate, environmental, health, and justice aren’t separate conversations, and AMR is one of the clearest examples of why we need to start seeing them as one. So, let’s talk about it now.