Listen to the full episode on

spotify apple podcasts amazon music

Introduction

The planet needs Young Changemakers to push Sustainability Agenda forward. Young change makers bring fresh perspectives, innovative ideas, and creative solutions to sustainability challenges. They are often not bound by traditional ways of thinking and can challenge existing systems and norms. Their unique experiences and perspectives can lead to novel approaches and breakthrough innovations.

Meet Prachi Shevgaonkar from Pune, India. She is a Climate Innovator and the founder of Cool The Globe. Prachi’s campaigns for climate action have reached over 25 Million citizens. Till date, citizens from 110 countries have come together on Cool The Globe App and saved 2.5 Million kg Greenhouse Gas Emissions, by making simple lifestyle changes for the environment.

Recently, PositionZero.org had an interesting conversation with Prachi on her journey and her future plans. To know more, please listen to the podcast.

Full transcript

Mandar(Host): Hello everyone. Welcome to Position Zero, stubbornly optimistic about the net zero. Thanks for tuning in. I’m your host, Mandar Bhagwat, and I’m thrilled to have you join us on this important mission. In this episode, we’ll be talking to Prachi Shevgaonkar. Prachi is a climate innovator and the founder of Cool The Globe, an app for climate action with users from 110 plus countries.
In 2022, Prachi has been awarded by the Finance Minister of India as the young Changemaker of the year. Prachi is the first Indian citizen to be appointed on the Advisory Board of Climate Leadership Coalition alongside the former Prime Minister of Finland. She was selected by the Minister of Environment and minister to represent India at COP 27 Climate Summit in Asia, where she received COP 27 Young Scholar Awrad from the Honorable Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav. Recently, Prachi featured in Google India’s campaign, inspired by her story of building Cool the Globe app.

Mandar (Host): Welcome to PositionZero podcast, Prachi. Thanks for joining in.

Prachi (Guest): Thank you; its my pleasure.

Mandar (Host): Let me start congratulating you on your Young Changemaker Award, that you received in 2022.

Prachi (Guest): Thank you so much.

Mandar (Host): Can you tell the audience what this award really means to you? And, little bit about the award itself

Prachi (Guest): So, Changemakers awards are given by The Hindi Newspaper every year to people doing in different kind of work in fields across. For me this award meant a lot because it was conferred by the finance minister and with award I can see that more and more people get to know about our work. And, more and more people join in. After the award we sent out the notification to all our users saying that this is recognition to all of us, to all of our work. And we increase in people putting climate action in the app. I think awards are for all users who are taking climate actions in their day to day life. Award meant something for their effort as well.

Mandar (Host): Ya! That’s great, its really fantastic, Prachi.I am sure many of our listeners would love to know about your project, how you started the project, what really motivated you to, you know, take that step.

Prachi (Guest): Yes, So this is a long journey. Long, big question with a big answer, is that, okay? where do you want me to start? from the very beginning?

Mandar (Host): Yeah, absolutely! Cool The Globe Project, right that you have. So how did you come about the idea itself?

Prachi (Guest): I knew that I wanted to do some kind, some kind of a work that, that has an impact. I didn’t know in what, in the beginning but when I was looking for, you know, what can I do? I remember doing a Google search and what is the biggest problem in the world right now? And I was still in college. That’s when climate change came up. And at first I was very surprised to see this because all of these global scientists and organizations were talking about how climate change is the most pressing issue in front of us. I wondered why isn’t anybody around me talking about it? So I started doing your research on what it exactly is. I started looking up on the effects of climate change. I read about coastal erosion, global warming, loss of biodiversity melting glaciers, and a host of scary things.

And I remember reading all of this and thinking, it sounds very worrying, but I don’t know if I care enough about this because I was still in college, right? I, I had enough on complete, I had friends to make extracurriculars, exams to give. At the time I thought, I don’t know if I have time to worry about polar ice melting in some other part of the world. But I, and I also thought that, you know, we have enough issues in front of us that we see in our day-to-day life, you know, from hunger to gender, to poverty, illiteracy and I thought climate change is happening somewhere else to somebody else at some other time. And that is beyond me. So I thought, you know, let’s leave this for a while and let’s think about my part of the world.

So I decided to take a gap here and travel across India working with social entrepreneurs who inspired me and trying to work on issuers and causes that mattered to me that I did care about. So I spent three months shadowing a farmer called Dynaneshwar Bodake was also based in Pune. He’s the founder of Abhinav Farmer’s Club. And with him I travelled across Maharashtra, meeting small farmers. Then another three months I spent with an organization called Hasrudala, working with waste workers on ground. Then I taught children across town and cities in India. I went on Jagriti Yatra, which is a train 18 day long train journey for people who want to change the world, essentially for young people who want to do something. And so throughout the year, I worked on different issues, met new people you know, trying, tried to understand the ground realities of India.

And in this year, as I was trying to find a cause other than climate change, what kept happening was I met people during this time who were the, who were facing in their day-to-day life. The consequences of this catastrophe impacts of climate change that I had only read about till then and meeting people on ground changed my entire perspective about this. So when I was working with Abhinav Farmer’s Club, I remember an old farmer telling me that I can’t afford to do this anymore because the weather has gotten so unreliable. And when I can’t afford to grow food, there are thousand people behind me who can’t afford to buy food. So climate change can also mean that more and more people go hungry. And this I care about. I met a young girl who, you know, in not very far from my home, in fact when I was volunteering for an NGO in education, and when I met her, I asked her, what, which standard are you in?

She said I don’t go to school anymore. Why is that? It was because her house got water only for two hours in the afternoon, and nobody else in the family could afford to stay at home during that time. So this was around the time that our city was in drought. Khadakwasala Dam had dried up, and I read about how extreme weather events like droughts happen more frequently and more intensely because of climate change. But this was the first time I realised that this can also mean that a bright young girl like her has to skip school and stay at home to fill buckets with water. And this I cared about. And I kept meeting more and more such people. And that year on ground made me realise that as ordinary citizens, we care about very simple things, right? We care about our homes, we care about our food, we care about our livelihoods, and most importantly, we care about our families and the people around us.

And only going on ground made me realise that climate change is impacting all of these things. And that is why I began caring about it. And I think that was the first half of the more important half of my journey trying to realise for myself why I care about this and why I want to work on this in the first place. And when I did realise that, then I remember asking the second question, which was, what can I then do about it? And this was an even more difficult question to answer, you know, I remember going to my father and asking him, what do you think an ordinary girl like me can do about a big problem like climate change? And so we thought, let’s start small. Let’s start from our own homes. We took up a quest to reduce our personal greenhouse gas emissions by 10% every year.

And so I started looking at, you know, which activities of mine are leading to most emissions? How can I reduce them? And also how can I measure them? And as I started doing this, you know, I, I started doing very small things. At first, you know my college was 15 kilometres. So three days in a month I would travel to college by public transport. I start, we put up a solar panel to heat our water. I started recycling some other plastic at home. And as I started doing that, I wanted to measure what difference it’s making. So I started, also started studying on how I can quantify the impact of these small actions. And a few months into this, two very interesting things happened. The first one was that I began to enjoy it.

You know, it almost became like a fun game that I was playing with my family. And it felt good that at least at my own level, I was doing something. And maybe because I was truly enjoying it my friends, relatives, neighbours, people around me began to take notice, and they would come to me and ask you know, you’re doing something different and how can we be a part of this with you? So that’s how we began thinking about how can we take this individual quest, we have started at home, and how can we get global citizens to do this with us? And from this, the idea for Cool The Globe app was born. So we decided to build an app, which would get global citizens together to start taking climate actions in their own homes, and also understand the impact of their day-to-day climate actions, their day-to-day sustainable behaviours.

Mandar (Host): That’s really great. That’s really fantastic story. And you, you are doing that, taking that one year off to go and really travel across the state and the country to really understand the problems of the ground is really incredible. What in my conversations with people, right? They understand the climate change, they know the global warming, they have heard about environmental related issues, but, but people think, you know, it’s somebody’s else’s problem. It is not something that I need to worry about and, and, you know, make changes in my lifestyle or, or they don’t even know you know, the impact of choices that they’re making. You know, with respect to the climate and with respect to the environmental issues. So through this, your initiative or through this, your application, how you are really inculcating the culture of, you know making people aware of this phenomena and sort of, you know, guiding them on this lifestyle changes. Can you put some light on that?

Prachi (Guest): I think our work is built on the belief, and I do strongly believe in this, that people it’s not that people don’t care, people do want to make a difference. It’s just that we don’t know what we can do. So we wanted to create something that is action oriented, which would let people know what are the small things they can start doing right away and what difference it can make. So I realised that in order to do anything at all, I needed two things. I first needed a clear goal in front of me, and then I needed to be able to measure my progress on that goal. So through the app, what we try to do is simplify and quantify sustainable behavioural change. So you know, as soon as a user would come in they get a monthly and an annual target to reduce their carbon footprint, and then they can see hundreds of simple day-to-day things they can do in order to achieve that.

And they can see the CO2 emissions that they’ve avoided by doing that. And you know, these things don’t necessarily have to be very difficult. They can align with the other aspects of your life as well. For example, if somebody wants to be fit one of the users call me up and said that he’s after downloading the app, he’s repaired his cycle and started going to his office on a cycle. By doing that, he’s become fitter, and he’d also saved over 60 kg CO2 emissions by doing this for a few months. You know another person you know I, I had, I got a call from an 86 year old woman who said that she, her granddaughter was getting married and she was going to buy new Saris for the occasion, but instead of doing that, she had decided to reuse her own Saris from her wedding.

And she had recorded saving 15 kg CO2 emissions in the app by doing that, and also saved a ton of money. You know, another person called me up and said that he started segregating waste at home. So he saved over four kg emissions by doing this for a month. So, so many users would call me up and talk about the action that made more sense to them, that aligned with their life, and they felt good knowing that they’re doing something and knowing that their actions have some kind of an impact. But then a lot of people would also come and say, what difference can one person make? But we believe that when a lot of people like us come together, then a collective impact can be very big. So, to show that we kept a global metre on the homepage of the app, which will show the emissions saved by all users combined, and that’s the part of collective action.

So I think these are a couple of, you know, while developing the app, we studied nudge theories, behavioural theories in detail along with studying climate science. And we realised that in order to get people towards action we need to tell them clearly what are the actions they can take. We, we need to tell them the impact of their actions, and we also need to give them a sense of community. There’s a difference between running alone and running a marathon, right? So I think that’s what we are trying to give people a sense of community and a purpose, in adopting to sustainable behavioural change.

Mandar (Host): Right? That’s, that’s really fantastic. Your application is influencing consumers and influencing citizens to you know take actions in their day-to-day life. How do you take this to a different scale? For example, the bigger impact you know the businesses and the industry, if they start acting on some of their responsibilities. So how do you take your initiative to that level? Do you have plans there?

Prachi (Guest): Yes. So you asked this question at just the right time, because when we launched this app for individuals so many users started calling me up and saying that, you know, I started doing this in my life, but how can my colony, how can my school, how can my organisation, and how can my city be a part of this as well? On the other side, a lot of organisations started approaching asking if there could be a similar version of the app for their workforce as well. And through this feedback, we began building an organisational version of the app, which is almost ready to launch now. We should be we should be good to launch in the next month or so. And, and the purpose of this is to enable communities and organisations to gamify sustainability for their members. So like we have a global metre on the app, there would be an organisational metre for all employees to see. They’d be able to see what are the other members of my organisations doing. Organisations can host challenges and leaderboards can know what their employees are doing and can know the collective impact of their workforce being sustainable in their homes and in their offices. And they can even give rewards on the basis of that. So I think you know, moving onto organisations and communities will kick in the next phase of growth because that would bring in people in a bulk that would bring in gamification, and that would bring in communities taking targets and taking actions together. So I think that’s, that’s, that has become the natural progression of the app. And so our next target is to get in individual as well as community members on the app.

Mandar (Host): So Prachi, you and your team you are inspiring and you know, many people around you and through your solution when you’re acting on it. Who are your role models?

Prachi (Guest): I have a friend who has been you know, like I told you, I wasn’t always passionate about sustainability. I discovered it much later when I tried to find causes other than climate change to work on. And only then did I realise that climate change is impacting every single thing we know. And working on this is the way to make the biggest impact. But I have a friend who has been passionate about the environment and sustainability for as long as I know her since childhood. And you know, I met her the other day and I asked her, why aren’t you working on this full-time? And she said, it’s because it’ll be a very negative space for me to be in. You know, she thought that she would get eco anxiety, you know, she would not feel very positive, and she has to take this decision for her mental health, not to work on this. But for me, it’s been the other way around. Ever since I’ve started working on climate change, I realised that once you are in this field, every single day, you are meeting people. You’re meeting innovators, you’re meeting young climate activist activists, you’re meeting organisations who are truly committed to net zero. You’re meeting policy makers who are taking ambitious decisions, and there’s a great sense of action and positivity in the movement. So I’m lucky to, since the time I started working on this, I’m lucky to have gathered so many role models. And the first ones are all, are users of the app you know, 40,000 citizens who are using it actively. And users who call me up every single day, I think they show great courage in deciding to make a difference in their day-to-day life. So I think those really are my first role models. And then there’s so many people who drive me, who inspired me to do better every day. So we got connected through Shrikant Dev sir right? So there’s a very interesting story on how we met. So his daughter was doing an internship with us, and she would every day she would go and tell him about the work we are doing, and we were having a great time working together. And at the end of her internship, I called her up to appreciate her work. She had worked very dedicatedly and sincerely. And after I was done with her call you know, in a few hours, I got a call from Shrikant Sir. And he said, I’ve been hearing about your work, and I have to tell you with my daughter, you get her father for free. I think this was about two years ago. And since then, he’s been a great mentor and an advisor to me. He you know, he’s, he’s been a sounding board. He’s been he’s been pushing me to do better, to expand our horizons and to reach our fullest potential. And, you know, every, every month, every week I get to meet people like this who align with our mission who advised me, who mentored me, who tell, who, tell me how I can do better and how I can reach the next league. You know, so I think I’m very lucky since the time I started working on this, to have not just one, but to have multiple role models without whom this could not have been possible.

Mandar (Host): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can, I can say that. And the more the people you meet you know, the more you get knowledge around this topic, and there are so many things happening in this area. So you learn from everyone, almost everyone that you meet. Prachi, thanks for joining us today. It has been a pleasure to have you on the podcast. We wish you the very best in your journey and look forward to speaking you again soon. Thank you very much.

Prachi (Guest):  Absolutely. I’m so excited about the work you are doing and I’m sure this podcast is the beginning of a long and wonderful association between us also.

Mandar (Host):  Absolutely. Absolutely. Looking forward to that. Thank you, Prachi. Thank you. Bye-Bye.

Prachi (Guest):  Yes, thank you so much. Bye.