Beyond social media battles, can we provide a pathway to activate climate-change warriors at the frontline?

Introduction

My previous article spoke of how we can infuse entrepreneurial thinking while fighting the larger battle against climate change to involve tribal , the indigenous and adivasi communities as frontline climate warriors. I will take this thought forward by asking the following: How can we help the people of our country gain access to and work with these front-line warriors?

While it is certainly encouraging to see youth, international organizations and other MNCs recognize the urgency of addressing climate change, we must not lose sight of the big picture. The battle for climate cannot simply be fought in boardrooms, conference halls or twitter pages. While these efforts help to build awareness around the issue, the real action for climate change is being enacted at the front-lines: by the Adivasis, indigenous and tribal communities who are interacting with the environment and who depend on it for their livelihood. The privileged and urban youth who have spent their whole lives in the concrete jungle cannot do much in the status quo beyond awareness campaigns in their echo chambers. The challenge of building this pathway between the youth and rural front-line workers is what I have tried to address through my work.

This has proved to form the underlying philosophy of my 1M1B (One Million for One Billion) initiative. In the past 8 years, my team has worked with many batches of young and privileged students from urban areas to provide them with a pathway to the villages and rural environment so that they can work hand-in-hand with local communities to help grow their businesses in socially-conscious ways. A model I’ve seen work time and again when trying to regularise a “recommended” practice within a community is to collapse it within existing incentive paradigms. The strongest one for most of India’s rural population is ‘roti, kapda, makkan’ (food, clothing and shelter). Below are some examples of how my team has tried to align environmentally-friendly practices that we want frontline-workers to adopt to fulfil their current needs. 

Reviving sustainability through a small kalamkari unit in Andhra

Back in 2015, I remember going to Andhra Pradesh and visiting the Pedna region, which was known for its exquisite Kalamkari style of textile printing. The process of Kalamkari requires one to wash the fabric in the Krishna River. In an attempt to keep up with growing product demands and reduce production costs and time, most artists were now using chemical dyes instead of the organic plant-based colors. Now the problem with these chemical dyes was that they were polluting the river to the detriment of its surrounding arable land. What was once an organic and sustainable practice was slowly morphing into an environmentally unsustainable one. 

A 1M1B fellow found a unit of 2 kalamkari artists who were fighting hard to retain the traditional authentic practice of their art and found an opportunity here. The father-son duo had set up a small Kalamkari museum showcasing the original tools used in the craft and the importance of retaining this Indian tradition. They spoke of how the people of India did not have pride in their ancient practices, and that in the absence of awareness, this artform would go extinct. This problem required us to combine entrepreneurial thinking with a larger social change agenda. 

We worked to build an association with a startup that source fabrics for various fashion brands with the organic Kalamkari businessmen in the hopes of building a local network of consumers. One of the advisors for 1M1B, Dr. S.V. Mahadevan, from Stanford suggested another simple, and brilliant idea: why don’t we ask these artists to make bags for wine bottles? Not only will it serve as an aesthetically pleasing accompaniment to the popular gift item, but it might also help in spreading some awareness and starting a conversation. This proved to be but one example of an idea that makes sustainable products profitable and trendy. I remember asking my 1M1B fellows: What are some other ways to make environmentally sustainable products mainstream and cool? They only needed to be asked once.

My team with a few young students from Bangalore and Hyderabad. Meeting here rural women amazingly skilled in Crochet (a handicraft in which yarn is made up into a textured fabric by means of a hooked needle). How about helping them in their livelihood and also making them climate change warriors protecting the Godavari and Krishna rivers?

Inspired initiatives by young high schoolers

A 14 year old student, Kanika, from the Future Leaders program in 2019 focused her project on the man/animal conflict in the inner depths of our forests and rural areas. Under 1M1B, she worked with schools in these areas to make school-children the Custodians of Conservation to lobby against the unethical poaching of animals. Over time, she worked with a number of schools in the area and created a curriculum to teach children strategies on how to protect their biodiversity and the forest. Some of these schools didn’t have fans or the internet, but now they had a sustainability curriculum thanks to her. She realized that the most important thing was to educate these school children - to activate this future cadre of front-line climate warriors. Another student, Niharika from Bangalore is working with the tribal community in Kerala to give them Aadhar cards so that they could access government loans and schemes. In exchange, she wanted a simple thing - to educate them on climate change and to spark a conversation on what they could do about it. 

Concluding remarks

During an innovation workshop within the rural interiors of Uttarakhand, I remember asking a question to a crowd of young, rural entrepreneurs: “what do you all have that I don’t?. After some silence, a girl stood up and proclaimed “We have clean air, fresh river water, wild animals run among us, birds are our friends. We have the environment.” Something dawned upon me at this moment - how can we make the forest a sustainable source of produce that benefits them? More importantly, how can we help them protect the environment while securing a livelihood through it?

No thought is complete without an experiment (with support from natives of villages who migrated in the 1950’s and now settled in San Francisco), I am currently testing a potential model in Srinagar, Uttarakhand. Over time, the number of almond trees in the area has reduced as people cut them to make space for buildings and homes. The big idea is to restart almond farming in the mountains. Not only would this serve as a source of income for many who were displaced by the floods; the almond trees would hold the soil firm, prevent erosion and further reduce the impact of future floods and earthquakes in the area. This is just another example of looking at climate from a business perspective. The results of how fruitful the business has been are yet to come in, but the scope to ideate and pilot similar ideas is infinite. 

At the heart of the climate change battle are the lives and livelihoods of the many indigenous and tribal communities who make up our first line-of-defense against the climate and environment. We need to push entrepreneurial thinking towards enabling the youth to work with these communities to become our front-line climate warriors. If not for our planet, we must do it for our future generations.