Yale Students and The India Climate Solutions Road Tour

Between January 1st and February 5th 2009, the India Climate Solutions Road Tour (https://indiaclimatesolutions.com), the brainchild of Alexis Ringwald (Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, ‘07) and Caroline Howe (Yale College ‘07, and soon to be at the FES), completed its 2,100 mile journey from Chennai to New Delhi using modified electric cars manufactured in India by the Reva Electronic Car Company as well as a host of other alternative-fueled vehicles. Having persuaded the CEO of the company�to donate three cars to the cause and to retrofit them with longer-life batteries that could travel 90 miles on a single six-hour charge and lay on a solar roof that would help them travel further, Ringwald and Howe set off on their journey across India, joined by Yalies Deepa Gupta and Kartikeya Singh (Forestry and Environmental Studies, ‘11), co-founders of the Indian Youth Climate Network (https://iycn.in/), and Alark Saxena (FES PhD ‘14) and Bidisha Banerjee (FES ‘10). The longest electric car caravan ever attempted, the road trip also included several Indian college students and young professionals, the Vice President of the Indian Compressed Natural Gas association, Solar Punch, a solar-powered band from New York, and a luggage truck that ran on plant oil extracted from jatropha and pongamia, plants locally grown on wasteland. Travelling through 15 cities, including Chennai, Vellore, Bangalore, Anantpur, Hyderabad, Pune, Goa, Ahmedabad, Ajmer and Udaipur,�as well as dozens of villages, tour members conducted day-long �Youth Climate Leadership Trainings� with hundreds of college students, and were invited to meet with the President of India, the Sheriff of Mumbai, the Union Minister for Science and Technology, and the Prince of Rajpipli, who runs a vermicomposting business.

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The main objective of the Climate Solutions Road Tour was to�bring together�people already implementing climate solutions across India to create�a network that could promote increased awareness, collaboration, leadership, innovation and inspiration in the movement towards a low carbon economy and a sustainable future. On their blog, team members declare that they are inspired by the need to create, communicate and celebrate solutions to climate change: creating solutions by inspiring individuals and empowering them through leadership trainings; communicating solutions by spreading the message of the urgency of climate change and the availability of political, technological and personal solutions through music, art, dance, and interactive discussions; and celebrating solutions through their positive and optimistic approach to the issue of climate change and eco-festivals honoring local organizations. In the course of their trip tour members�documented inspirational climate solutions that demonstrate significant co-benefits for the economic, social and environmental welfare of the country (https://indiaclimatesolutions.com). In an interview with the Hindustan Times, Deepa Gupta shared some of the things that the road trip had opened her eyes to, ‘like organic farming in Andhra Pradesh, or using neem and garlic as pesticides, or the kind of recycling in slums, such as Dharavi. We saw things already in place like the Gadhia solar plant in Valsad, Gujarat, where steam is used for cooking and you can feed almost 50,000 people in one go.’ For Bidisha Banerjee, the highlights were too numerous to recount, but included ‘included meeting with organic farmers practicing drip-irrigation in Andhra Pradesh, visiting green buildings and a smart solar micro-grid in Hyderabad, and learning from a college in Rajasthan that trains rural poor from around the world to work on key issues like solar-power generation, water-harvesting, health and sanitation.’

The India Climate Solutions Road Tour was part of the India Climate Solutions project, created and directed by Caroline Howe and Anna da Costa. Caroline Howe�graduated from Yale College in Mechanical & Environmental Engineering in 2007, with a focus on climate change and Yale’s campus sustainabilty. She has worked on climate change adaptation, mitigation, and sustainable development projects in Central America, West Africa, Australia, Southeast Asia, and has been living in India for the past two years working with The Energy &�Resources Institute and Infosys. She is also working as the Climate Solutions Coordinator for IYCN. Anna da Costa�graduated from Cambridge University in 2006 with a BA in Zoology and Conservation. Since then, she has spent time in India and the UK, working and writing on climate change impacts, political and corporate leadership, and climate solutions with organizations including the�Ecologist magazine, the Navdanya Trust, the St. Paul’s Institute and The Climate Group. Anna is�Co-Director�for the�Climate Solutions Project,�and Advisor to the Cleanstar Trust on corporate engagement and climate policy. Howe and da Costa set up the Climate Solutions Project in the hope that it would become a resource for multiple Indian stakeholders on climate change best practice and a catalytic tool for accelerating the national and international climate response. The Climate Solutions project�is supported�by�the Indian Youth Climate Network (IYCN), which also played an important role in the road trip. Born with the vision that there is an urgent need to get youth and young professionals to begin to start contemplating the implications of climate change for India and the world, the IYCN is devoted to connecting people across the nation. It seeks to empower the next generation as climate leaders and mobilize them into collective action to show the world that India is taking action and that the solutions exist and they are here to be utilized and replicated today. Together, these organizations, in Howe’s words(quoted in Thomas L. Friedman’s New York Times op-ed on the road trip), seek to to ‘bring people together around existing solutions to inspire more action and more innovation.’ ‘There’s no time left,’ Howe concludes, ‘to just talk about the problem.’