The Biosphere Reserves are laboratories of sustainability that provide local solutions to global challenges such as climate change or the conservation of biodiversity. They promote research, education and the creation of communities of practice that jointly generate knowledge that may be applicable to cooperative decision-making at local scales.

The context of global COVID-19 pandemic posed a great challenge to all teaching and learning processes and so to the co-creation of knowledge. To counteract it, we developed an online teaching environment (webinar) to enhance the value of ecosystems and analyze the perception of youth, a key interest group in participatory governance of the territory, in relation to the provision of ecosystem services in the Biosphere Reserve in Indonesia.

We took the experience of the Programme "Ecosystem Services of Euskadi" as a reference and developed a questionnaire on the perception of the provision of ecosystem services. The results showed that the highest evaluation corresponded to “cultural services” and the most valued environmental unit was “primary and secondary forest”.

Our results contribute to establish a baseline to understand the relationship of youth with the territory within the framework of the MAB Programme and in addition, to set up an international scientific cooperation.

This experience showed that the promotion of online solutions can help counteract the global pandemic negative effects on teaching processes and also empower local actors, specially the youth which have a key present and future role in global sustainability processes, as well as in shared local management of the Biosphere Reserve.