From Doomscrolling to Doing: My Climate Leadership Journey - By Ananya Srivastava

Watching Lonely Planet while feeling a little lonely in my concern for the planet, my nightly Instagram doomscroll led me to an unexpected blessing: The Climate Initiative’s Climate Leadership Programme (CLP). After two months of online sessions, I found myself in Bengaluru for a five-day Climate Communications Bootcamp that changed how I think about climate action, communication, and community.

Imagine an eco-friendly oasis tucked away in Bangalore’s traffic-and-concrete jungle. Here, I found people who loved nature as much as I did. We were all climate nerds, and nobody was looking for an escape route when the conversation turned to the environment. A discussion about solar panels could become a full-blown conversation, without anyone getting bored or rolling their eyes at us for “caring too much.” Things that might earn a polite nod elsewhere sparked genuine excitement here. It was a joy to find people who just got it.

Over five days, one question stayed with me: How do you make people care about something as overwhelming as climate change? We learnt to KISS, or “Keep It Simple, Silly!” We explored how analogies, storytelling, and everyday experiences can make complex climate science relatable, and how climate issues show up in unexpected places, from fast fashion to instant-delivery apps. But these lessons truly came together during our final presentation.

My team and I created Prakriti in Plastic, a photography exhibition on plastic pollution. We took a trip down memory lane through our phone galleries, collecting photographs of plastic photobombing our everyday lives. There were plenty, especially in Prakhar’s beautiful street and wildlife photographs, capturing humans and animals coexisting with plastic as though it were just another part of nature.