Climate change and loss of natural resources are an intergovernmental crisis and global-scale efforts have been outlined to tackle them. But even as the scientific communities come together to develop solutions, individuals or small groups, at their own levels, have been innovating and drawing from traditional knowledge to save native floral species and address water scarcity.
We have profiled some of these changemakers every month of 2024, to understand their initiatives and what drives them to innovate. Here is a compilation:
Kelühol Tase and his brothers opened a rhododendron park last year to conserve the flower impacted by wild forest fires and continuous human activities.
Asma and Aboobakar want to save as many indigenous paddy varieties as possible; they have so far documented 840 such plants
Kusum and Narayan Gaikwad are likely to be remembered for long in their village, Jambhali, in Kolhapur district of Maharashtra. For five decades, the family has preserved a traditional corn variety that may soon go extinct.
Traditional Ikat weavers of Odisha, like Bhagwati and her husband Radhakanta, mobilised into a company to improve incomes and lives.
For the past eight years, about 20 women like Mamta Ramnath Dhurve and Sangita Naresh Parchake in Lahan Mowada village have been meeting regularly to discuss their experiments with organic farming, and what results these have shown. Not only did their incomes improve, they also paved way for women empowerment in many other ways.
Since 2020, the water situation in Hiwardhara village in Maharashtra has changed for the better. Every household in the village has access to potable water and also works to save the resource through tanks and rainwater harvesting facilities.
This change is brought by Kinake, who realised the need for the village to take charge of water management after tying up with the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), a non-profit working in the area. Re
Every weekend since 2016, VU Sabu from Ambalavayal village in Wayanad district, Kerala, embarks on a journey to the Western Ghats, not for leisure but with a mission to safeguard wild orchids. Despite lacking agricultural expertise, he initiated his own approach to collect, conserve and augment these plants.
So far, he has successfully replanted around 200 wild orchid varieties in the Western Ghats, including 16 endangered varieties such as Acampe rigida and Bulbophyllum careyanum that are part of the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). He has also planted 4,000 commercial orchid plants in three poly houses covering 750 square metres.
A student from Bhubaneswar warns farmers of pest attacks using new-age technology