Ms. Prachi Shevgaonkar, climate innovator and founder of the app Cool the Globe
Ms. Prachi Shevgaonkar, climate innovator and founder of the app Cool the Globe
Hello. Good afternoon, everybody. I’m not standing behind the podium because you may not see me from there. But it’s such an honour for me to be here because Albert Sir said so many kind words. And before any of that was there, before any milestones were met and any accomplishments came our way, I was just a fresh graduate with an app with barely 10,000 users at the time. It was at that time when the Rotary Club of Bombay, Ramesh Sir, recognised me. It was at that time when I first met many of you. And so, in a way, many of the things we said that we were able to do in the past couple of years, they belonged to all of us and they happened because of all of you. And so, it really is a true honour to be here and to get to tell you a little bit about what we want to do, moving ahead, because it’s just the beginning.
Albert Sir, his brief to me was that he wanted me to talk about two things. The first thing he wanted to talk to me about is a talk; he wanted me to talk about why am I even here? You know, why do I do any of this? Why do I do the work I do? And how did I get here? So he wanted me to tell you all about that.
I think my journey really began, he asked me about what the trigger point was. And I remember when I was in third or fourth standard, my school teacher had given us a very interesting homework. She asked us to write a letter to our future selves. Ten years from now, where would I want to be? And who would I want to be? And I wrote that letter and then completely forgot about it. Many years passed, you know, I passed my 10th standard and I found myself at a very defining phase in life, where I was wondering what career choice I should make. And I was about to take admission for computer engineering, but something didn’t feel right. There was an itch within that maybe there’s something different that I want to do. And it was at that time that something interesting happened.
My school teacher sent that very letter back to me, written by my younger self ten years ago to the Prachi she aspired to be. And reading it was a huge wake-up call. Because in it, my younger self had written about making a difference, changing the world. And I’d not thought that way in a very long time. So I got inspired by the words and the dreams of my younger self. And that is when I decided to take a gap year to try and figure out how I could make some kind of a difference through my career. And so I remember one of the first questions I asked is, if I’m trying to consciously decide what kind of a career I want to have, how many hours am I even going to spend at work? And so I remember googling this and I was very surprised by the answer.
Can anybody guess how many hours do any of us put in work in our lifetimes? In our lifetime, total. And how many hours does it take for somebody to become an expert or something? 10,000 hours, that’s right. So I was surprised to know that all of us spend about 90,000 hours at work on average in our lifetimes. And I thought, if even 10% of that can go into solving some real-world challenges around me, and if everybody did that, then all of us would be experts in making the world a better place. And I don’t have to tell this to any of you, because I think that’s what Rotary stands for.
Before this meeting even began, I met so many of you who are living by that rule. Kanti, ma’am, I think you do much more than just 10%. Dr. Jehangir spends two days a month going to the hospital and giving free services. I think that’s what all of you live by, and that’s why it really means a lot to me to be here in front of you, because that’s what I wanted to do as well, to try and figure out how I could make some kind of a difference.
And so I remember this. So when I decided that, the first thing that came was that I had to make the first presentation of my life. And that first presentation was to my parents, my mum, who’s sitting here in front of. So I worked for the whole week in making a proposal. I put together a proposal. There were case studies in it. There was a list of pros and cons. There was a plan of what I wanted to do over the next year. And there were references to other people who had done something similar. And I made that proposal, and I called my parents in a café, and I pitched it to them. And by the end of it, they were just as excited as I was to come on the journey with me. And so we decided that for the next year, we are going to be exploring what kind of a career we want to craft, which would make some kind of a difference.
And so I remember doing a search on what is the biggest problem in the world right now. What came up? Any guesses? Yes, you have the spoiler already. So I was very surprised to see that global organisations, experts, people around the world were talking about how climate change is the most pressing issue in front of us today. But nobody around me was really talking about it. So I started reading up more about what’s happening because of climate change. And all of you must have heard a little bit about it. Extreme weather events are happening more frequently and more intensely. So we opened the newspaper today. We hear articles and articles on flooding, wildfires, storms, droughts, sea levels are rising. So they say that Mumbai might go underwater someday. Changes in rain patterns. So Indian monsoon might be permanently altered. Retreat of glaciers. Loss of biodiversity. I read about all of this.
And then I remember asking myself a question that I’m going to ask all of you today as well. Do you care about climate change? Yes. Yes, OK. I did not expect anything else from all of you. But maybe I was not as aware as you at the time. Because I remember having a moment of honesty with myself and thinking, yes, it does sound very worrying. But I don’t care enough about this. To my credit, I was barely 17 years old. I had friends to make. I had exams to give, extracurriculars. And even beyond that, I saw so many issues in front of me. I saw poverty, illiteracy, and inequality. Why should I care about polar ice melting in some other part of the world? And so I decided to think about my part of the world. I made a list of some people who were my role models, people whose work was inspirational to me. Many of them were social entrepreneurs, and I started approaching them, asking if I could shadow them for a couple of months. And so I was very surprised that many of them said yes.
The first person who agreed to let me do this was a small farmer from Pune called Dnyaneshwar Bodke. So he started farming. He used to work as an office boy. And then he decided to quit his job and start farming on his one-acre barren land. Now everybody in his family was very scared because farming had not been profitable for years. But he relented anyway. And one year later, the bank manager came to their house. His father got very scared. He thought the bank manager had come to take their land because he could not pay the debt. But instead, the manager touched his father’s feet, fed him sweets, and said, your son has begun a revolution. He’s the first ever farmer to repay a loan of 15 lakhs in a year and gain profits from a one-acre barren land.
Now other neighbouring farmers heard about it and started asking how they could do this as well. And so he created a one-acre farming model. And he started getting groups of farmers together to do this collectively. And they set up Abhinav Farmers Club. And by the time I started working with him, there were about 2.5 lakh farmers across India doing this. They were earning a revenue of 400 crores. And I went to his house and I told him, I’m very inspired by the work you’re doing. And for the next four months, everywhere you go, I’ll come with you. And he said, okay, I’m going to Ratnagiri tomorrow. Come along with me. And so that’s what I did. For four months, I travelled across Maharashtra with him and visited many farmers and watched what they couldn’t do alone, collectively, they could. And watched how they were able to turn their unprofitable farmlands profitable by looking at it like a business, by solving the weather unreliability, by solving the market unpredictability. And I think from many of the things I could not have learned from formal education, I learned from him. I learned from him what real leadership looks like. And most importantly, I learned that when you achieve a little bit of success in your own life, of course, it means something. But when you help people around you achieve that same success, that’s when you become a change maker.
So that’s where I learned how to build a movement. The next person I worked with was this woman founder called Nalini Shekar. She was running Hasiru Dala, and she was helping waste pickers become entrepreneurs. So I went to her and said the same thing. She said, why do you want to do this? I said, I want to be inspired. She said, if you
really want to be inspired, don’t spend time with me. Spend time with the community. Spend time with waste pickers. That’s where you’ll find real heroes. And so for the next four months, I visited all landfills across Bangalore, and I met some remarkable, remarkable people. And from that experience, I learned that we have change makers in every corner of the country. From a 75-year-old woman who was the pillar of her community, everybody, young and old, would go to her for advice. To a young man, Mansoor, who started a radio channel to talk about the plights of waste pickers.
I met amazing people there, who also taught me that real change takes place in our homes and in our day-to-day lives, and in the way we conduct ourselves in our day-to-day lives. And another four months after that, I spent going across slums in Pune, working in study centres set up by IDEA Foundation. And over there, we were doing something very interesting. We were documenting the dreams of children. So I talked to thousands of young people, kids asking them what their dreams looked like and who they wanted to become. And yeah, we got tons of answers.
Do you want to guess what were the most common answers? What did kids want to become when they grew up? There were three answers that were the most common. I noticed the children who were most attracted by entrepreneurship making money, they wanted to become conductors, bus conductors, because that is the person they knew with the most amount of money in the conductor box. The kids who were most driven towards authority and power, they wanted to become police officers, and the kids who were driven by impact wanted to become teachers, because that is the person they knew with the highest impact. And so I think I learned a lot from talking to children, because they had this immense clarity about their communities and what needed to be done. But then I would talk to these kids, I would get inspired, I would get energised, and I’d go back to the foundation’s office to the grim reality that most of them were actually going to end up dropping out. And this is what we were working towards changing.
Another interesting thing that happened during this time was I was working on things other than climate change. But it was around this time that, for the first time, I kept meeting people who were facing the catastrophic effects of climate change that I’d only read about until then. And they changed my entire perspective of looking at the issue. I remember meeting this young girl when I was working at IDEA Foundation. I asked her, which standard are you in? She said, I don’t go because in her house she gets water for one hour in the afternoon. And nobody else in her family could afford to stay at home during that time. So I’d of course read about how extreme weather events like droughts happen more frequently and more intensely because of climate change. It was the first time I realised that it 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.
I remember meeting this young boy, I asked him a simple question. I asked him, if you get one wish, you can ask for anything in the world, what would you ask for? I’ll never forget his answer. He said, I’d wish that my house wouldn’t get filled with water again. Now, of course, we’ve all read about how extreme weather events like floods destroy homes of millions of people every year. But that was the first time I realised that it can also mean that a bright young boy like him has to worry about something as basic as a shelter above his head. And this I cared about.
An old farmer taught me more about climate change than any other global expert ever could. He said, small farmers like me just can’t afford to keep doing it anymore because the weather has become so unreliable. And when I can’t afford to grow food, there are thousands of 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 cared about. So it was during this time that I kept meeting people again and again who showed me that as ordinary citizens, we care about very simple things.
Forget about climate change for a while. I want to ask all of you, what is it that you care about the most in your day-to-day life? What matters to you the most? Health, very true. What else do you care about? Family. Yes, seasons. Absolutely. That’s when I realised that as ordinary citizens, we care about very simple things. We care about our health. We care about our food. We care about our livelihoods. And most importantly, we care about our families and the people around us. And it was only when I realised and I witnessed firsthand how climate change was affecting all of these things did I realise that yes, I do care about climate change. And that’s really when I started asking myself the next question, which is, what is it then that I can do about it? Now, this was not an easy one to answer because climate change seemed like this big problem beyond my control. I remember going to my father and asking him, what can an ordinary girl like me do about a big problem like climate change? And we decided to start from our own home. We took up a challenge that year to try and reduce our own carbon footprint by just 10%.
So I started looking at what are the different activities through which I can do this. So very simple things. For two days in a month, I took public transport to go to my college, or we set up a plastic recycling system at home. We set up a solar panel. So small things like this, we did in the first few months. And then I realised that if I wanted to continue on this journey, I had to be able to measure the impact of my actions. Because only when we can measure, can we change something. And so we started looking at how we measure our avoided emissions by taking these small sustainable actions in our lives. And as we started doing that, two very interesting things happened.
The first one was that I began to enjoy it. It almost became like a fun game that I was playing with my family, and it felt good. At least at my own level, I was doing something. And secondly, maybe because I was enjoying it so much, my friends, neighbours, relatives, people around me also started to notice. And they started coming and saying, you’re doing something interesting and we’d like to be a part of this. And that’s really when we began thinking about how we take this individual quest and get global citizens to join us in it. And from this, the idea for Cool the Globe came about—an app to unite people like you and I to start making climate action a part of our lives.
And so I started thinking, in order to achieve anything at all, not just climate action, anything at all, what are some things, qualities we need? What do you think? What are some traits we need to achieve something? Passion, discipline, absolutely. Hard work, yes. Consistency, hard work. Funding, that’s the most important one. So I realised, like many of you said, that in order to achieve anything, I first needed a clear goal in front of me that I could work consistently towards. And then I needed to be able to measure the impact of my actions and measure how much of that goal I have achieved. And so the way we designed the app is that a user would come in, they’d get a monthly target to reduce their carbon footprint. And usually, that would be about 10 percent of what your current carbon footprint is. And then you’d be able to see hundreds of simple day-to-day actions you can take to meet that. And with every action, you’d be able to see the emissions you’ve saved by doing that. So for example, while going back to Pune now, I’ll be taking a bus. So the app will show me that I would have saved around three kg of CO2 emissions by doing that. Or I stole my sister’s kurti today for this event instead of buying a new one. And when she was yelling at me for doing that, I put it in the app and showed her, I saved five kg of CO2 emissions by doing that. Or I increased the temperature setting of my AC by two degrees Celsius in the office. And I’d be able to see that I saved 14 kg emissions by doing this. I cut down on eating meat just for this month. My grandmother was very happy with me for doing that. And I also saved around 20 kg of emissions. So people would be able to see what are the simple changes they can make and what is the impact of those sustainable changes.
But then a lot of people believe what difference can one person make? But we think that when a lot of people like us come together, then a collective impact can be extraordinary. And to show that, we kept a global meter on the homepage of the app, which will show the CO2 emissions saved by all app users combined. So I built this app along with my father while I was in college. And by the time I graduated, it was ready to launch. But we realised that now the real work starts. We have the platform, but the real work is in getting people on it. The real work is in convincing people that in the face of climate change, our actions matter and we can make a difference. And so we started making very simple video campaigns on what the common person can do about climate change. And our message was very simple. Let each one of us take a challenge to reduce our carbon footprint by 10% this year.
So you come in, you decide to take two climate actions in a month. You tell ten other people around you about it, and you’ll see how one climate action taken by you would inspire ten others and create a ripple effect for change. And what started happening very interestingly is we just shared these videos with people who had helped us make the app, our friends, relatives, they shared it with some more, they shared it with some more. And before we knew it, millions of people around the world were watching it. One of them was Ramesh Narayan Sir who introduced me to all of you. And it was extraordinary how people started coming and taking the simple actions on the app.
A nine-year-old girl emailed me and said, what change can I make in my life to fight climate change? And she decided to start going to her school on a cycle. And by doing this for a few months, she recorded saving 60 kg of CO2 emissions, which was three times her weight. Another old woman called me and said, I can’t do much, it’s not like I can use public transport or a cycle, but I still want to do something. She decided to reuse, her granddaughter was getting married. So for her granddaughter’s wedding, she decided to reuse her own sari from her wedding 50 years back. And by doing this, she recorded saving 15 kg of emissions on the app. So we really saw how people started coming in, started taking actions, which made the most sense in their life. And one action inspired hundreds of others. And through completely citizen-led, youth-led movements like this, we reached millions, over 25 million people around the world.
Today, when I met you last, we had barely 10,000 users on the app. Today, we’ve just crossed one lakh users, we’ve reached 150 countries, and all of these people collectively have saved five million kg CO2 emissions on the app. And this is just the beginning. So what started happening very interestingly is users, when individuals started using the app, and they said, I’m doing this in my own life, but now I want to start doing this with my peers, with my colleagues.
So many organisations came to us and said, we would like our employees to use this as well. And we also got many mentors along the way, like Ramesh sir, who advised us that, do you want to make this big? If you want to unleash the true potential of what Cool the Globe can be, then you also have to look at an entrepreneurship angle to this. And we saw that so many organisations today want to take climate action. They have wonderful sustainability programmes, but they also want to figure out a way to engage their workforce in it. And that’s how we launched Cool the Globe for organisations and communities. Using it, we have a community dashboard on the app. So in fact, we can have a dashboard for the Rotary Club of Bombay, where everybody takes actions. And we see in real-time what are the emissions being saved by all Rotarians combined. We can host challenges for citizens. Rotary Club of Bombay special challenge. We can have leaderboards. We can see which one of us is taking the most amount of actions. And we can reward them in one of the meetings like this.
So we created this community dashboard on the app, because we also realised that real climate action is taken together, not individually. And so people can come in. They can compete and collaborate to start becoming sustainable through using this community version. And what we’re looking at doing next is to get schools, colleges, organisations, Rotarians, and even cities to make up their own communities and dashboards for climate action on the app.
And so yes, so that is the vision now. I think when I started this journey, I remember I used to read in history books about freedom fighters and scientists and
innovators. And I used to think, I live in such boring times. I should have been born then. But today I realise that I find myself at the cusp of our youth in perhaps some of the most defining decades of human existence, because the actions we take today, we have only 30 years to avoid the worst effects of climate change. So the actions we take today, the conversations we have today about protecting our planet, about taking climate action, they are going to define the lives of generations to come. And that’s not just a responsibility. It’s an opportunity to make a difference. It’s an opportunity to leave a mark on the world through our day-to-day actions.
I’d read somewhere at the beginning of this journey that somebody had written that it seems like it’s going to take a miracle to avoid the worst effects of climate change. But we truly believe that when people like us come together to take climate action, miracles can happen. So let’s make them happen together.
Thank you so much.
President Satyan Israni: Prachi, that was really insightful. I mean, I’m amazed at 26, what all you have achieved. And for the next 26, well, you will take all of us. And I think we should really sign up as RCB on the app. And let’s see who’s doing the best. We will start with RCB. So, excellent. Now we should start using it also.
ROTARIANS ASK
I mean, you were talking about so many statistics regarding measuring. Who decides what that particular benchmark is? What is that yardstick?
Absolutely, that’s a great question and there are so many ways in which you can become sustainable and take climate action. How do we measure all of that under one umbrella, and that has been a struggle for a long time because there were yardsticks for measurement at a bigger level. So we could measure the carbon footprint of countries and organisations, but what about individuals? So there are two inputs that we essentially need. One is the base emission factor. So if I’m taking my car to come here, there’s an emission factor to petrol. So from cradle to grave, from the first time, from factory till the time, what are the emissions that happen in the life of a can of petrol? So that is calculated and organisations like IPCC, World Bank, Edgar, IEA, they work on calculating that. And then we need a user input which is what is the distance you travel, what is the mileage of your car. So people can put that in and the app then calculates that for them. So to make this a trouser for me, for example, first we had to extract petroleum from a factory, then we had to, a farmer was making cotton, then both of them came together, then a cloth was stitched, then it travelled 10,000 kilometres to Bangladesh to make this trouser and then it travelled another thousands of kilometres to come to my house and by the time it reached my house, I had gained a bit of weight, I wasn’t fitting me anymore. So it just stayed in my closet. So basically, just the way we have our lives, our clothes, the things we use, the things we do, all of them also have their own life. So there, scientists measure the emission factors behind all of this. So we use those base emission factors to then calculate the impact.
Prachi, can you just share with us, say, five or six ways that all of us, say, living in Mumbai, can do what we should, we can do to decrease our carbon footprint?
Absolutely. That’s a great question. That’s my favourite question. So I think first, there are a few steps to this. The first step has nothing to do with sustainability. The first step is deciding what your goals are in your life. If your goal is to become fit, is it to save money? Is it to spend more time with family? If your goal is fitness, then you start walking short distances or you start cycling a little bit. If your goal is to save money, then you recycle and upcycle clothes. You buy less, you shop less. If your goal is to spend time with family, then try doing chores together manually instead of using appliances at home. So decide what it is that gives you happiness. Based on that, decide one climate action that you can take. And this can be across different areas. It can be in the way you travel. It can be in the way you use appliances at home. It can be in the materials you use. And it can be in what kind of investments you make, even what kind of things you buy. And then decide just one climate action and decide to start taking that one climate action from this month. Once you’ve done that, then you figure out a way to make it fun. How do you enjoy it? How do you truly get joy from doing it? Because real sustainability should not be a burden. It should only add value to your life. And then the next thing is to calculate. Then you can come on the app and measure the emissions you’re avoiding by doing that. Measure the impact of that action. And then the fifth thing, the most important thing, is that you show off. You tell ten other people about it. And you’d see how your one action would inspire ten others and create a ripple effect for change.
You were mentioning something about cities and the rising temperatures and the rising water levels. So lots of cities have already started coming up with master plans of what they should do. Are you aware of whether the coastal cities of India have started doing any master planning on the front?
Absolutely, so every city and especially the coastal cities now have started taking climate change very seriously. And our India as a country has a very ambitious mission called mission life. It’s called mission lifestyle change for the environment. What our prime minister says is that sustainability is not something alien to us. It’s a part of our culture. What we really want to do through mission life is to make this a part of every citizen’s life. So the government has identified a list of 75 actions that they want all citizens to take up and you know, I think the app is in fact an app for life in a way to quantify the lifestyle changes for the environment that people are making. So lots of cities are now making their own mission life plans on how they could inspire citizens to start taking climate action. Because they also realise that yes, systemic changes are needed. We need changes in policy. We need changes in the way businesses and organisations operate. But systemic changes take place when citizens like us care about it when people like us say I care about this and I want to take this action in my own life. That’s when businesses are driven to start making products that are sustainable. That’s when politicians are driven to start making policies that are climate friendly. So it really starts from our own homes. And that’s why many cities are now driving mission life programmes to inspire their citizens to start taking climate action.
Prachi, can you just share with us your role with the Tata Power companies, because I think that’s an interesting one that everybody will benefit from, as to how much influence you have in a corporate kind of space. We would all be encouraged to have people like you on their committees.
Absolutely. So Tata Power is now looking to shift completely to a renewable energy portfolio in the next few years to come. And I still remember the CEO and MD, Dr Praveen Sinha, when we were signing the MOU for me to become a climate advisor. He said, we have a rule to have grey hair when you come on board as an advisor. And coincidentally, just that month, I got my first two grey hairs. So I said, now I’m really qualified to do this. So what we do is, so I think organisations like Tata Power now realise that sustainability is not just the tick box on the side. When you take real climate action and make sustainability a part of your operations and your long-term vision, that’s really, organisations that do that are going to become the leaders of the new millennium. So for Tata Power, sustainability is at the very core of what they do. They’re going to shift completely to renewables. They have a programme called Sustainable is Attainable, and they have a climate group within their workforce. So there are two things I do. One is I look at how this transition can take place to reaching net zero and to shifting completely to renewable. So I’m going to be meeting the leadership and Dr Praveen Sinha sir, next week when I come to Mumbai as well. And we meet every quarter to discuss how we could make this happen. And secondly, what I also do is, you can only achieve these ambitious things if your employees are on board with you. So I speak with their employees across India about climate action and about how they can be involved in what Tata Power is doing. And I think that’s what organisations across India are looking to do now. Take up ambitious sustainability goals and figure out a way to make their employees involved in it. So they are also using Cool the Globe app to get employees to start taking climate actions at work. And they’re throwing different challenges. So on the app, we have a community board and the CEO, the sustainability head of Tata Power, can send messages to their employees. They can throw a challenge. There was work from the office this week. There was a cycle to office week. So there are challenges like that that they throw. And I try to inspire employees to take that up and to take this seriously.