Speaker: Sailee Rane, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
How (and why) are you taking action on climate change solutions in, for, and with your community?
Sailee Rane: Hi. Uh I'm Si and I live in Bangalore in India. I currently work as an Environment fellow with AC T Grants where I identify early stage ventures with the potential to create catalytic impact on the environment space to give grants. To, to be honest, I studied first about climate change and environmental science in high school, but I did not give it much thought. However, in the last few years, the impacts of climate change have been very, very palpable in India. We have seen devastating floods and extremely severe heat waves sometimes within a span of weeks. In the same place, we have seen extremely poor air quality and we are seeing our cities struggle with water. It was clear to me that climate change was no longer a theoretical possibility in the future. But a reality of today, I think it's the biggest challenge of our generation. However, for most people around me, they did not seem to be aware or acknowledge the problem or at least the severity of it. While a lot of people noticed that the weather was changing, they did not link it to the larger phenomenon of climate change or to the underlying factors causing it. There was hardly any coverage of climate related news in the mainstream media in India and I thought this needs to change. So I started a blog called Sunny Climate Stormy Climate with an aim to make conversations about climate more common. I write a fortnightly newsletter where I cover five stories. Three of them stormy ones that talk about the devastating impacts like hurricanes, the increasing frequency of cyclones, heat waves, uh the rising sea levels, you know what's happening to our glacier and two sunny ones that talk about solutions that tell people that there is still hope. Um And we can we still have the power to make a change I've also made and conducted quizzes about climate change and hope to experiment with more formats that allow me to take this conversation to more people.
Who or what inspires/inspired you to care about climate change and climate solutions?
Sailee Rane: It, the inspiration for this really came from some amazing coverage of climate news in the global media and the relative absence of it in India and in more more broadly in Southeast Asia. I've loved reading pieces from publications like Carbon Brief, the South Pole and even the climate coverage done by the Guardian. And I felt the least I could do was bring these stories to more people and get them to start talking about this critical issue. I do believe that people have the power to make a change. Um But the first step here is going to be arming them with more information and just starting this conversation.
