#RingTheBell

Ananya Kamboj is a Global Citizen, and a 16-year-old girl. She happens to be an ambassador of football, peace, SDGs, gender equality, and youth empowerment. Her wish is to take the spirit of hope, togetherness, and inspiration to millions of children across India and South Asia and make this world a better place to live in.

Ananya actively advocates for global challenges such as climate change while also using sports to promote gender equality and women empowerment. She is the founder of 'Sports to Lead', an initiative that focuses on using sports as a medium to encourage learning and breed leadership and SDGs among the youth in urban and rural India

For the last four years, she has been selected to represent India as a Young Journalist at the global Football for Friendship (F4F) social program. Football for Friendship is an annual International Children's social program that unites children of different nationalities, different genders, and different physical abilities. The goal of the project is the development of children’s football, fostering tolerance, and respect for different cultures and nationalities among children from different countries. The key values that the participants support and promote are friendship, equality, fairness, health, peace, devotion, victory, traditions, and honor.

She was awarded the best young journalist award for my effort in spreading the values of the program through this book.

Check more details about the book here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1643242237/

Ananya Kamboj's social media links are as follows:

Facebook -  https://facebook.com/KambojAnanya

Twitter - https://twitter.com/KambojAnanya

Instagram -  https://instagram.com/KambojAnanya

Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/ananyakambojofficial

Christine is a climate and environmental activist from South Africa, and currently, She is a part of many organizations. She runs community cleanups on Sundays where they tackle areas that are key spots of illegal dumping, littering and plastic pollution, which is usually near dams, rivers, fields, or diverse forests which are habitats to many frogs, tree squirrels, insects, birds, and even rodents. She constantly writes to the mayor and department heads in the City of Ekurhuleni about this, but there’s been little to no correspondence from their side.

She is also part of Fridays for Future International. Christine does not only participate in the strikes on Fridays (mostly digital strikes lately because of COVID-19), but also is a part of their research and outreach group.

She is also a Communications and Research intern at Extinction Rebellion South Africa and co-organizer for her local group, and they are currently working on campaigns against the EACOP pipeline in East Africa, Standard Bank Oil Investment, Eskom Fossil Fuels Exploitation, Vaal Dam Pollution.

She is also part of the Restless Development Youth group that was selected from South Africa which is a platform to hack global goals problems and gather solutions for them. Out of 685 applicants, only 80 people were chosen – and she is one of the selected people. Her focus in South Africa is education and livelihood. She had our first hack on the 19th of February 2021, and the next one will be the end of April. The campaign is called Youth Power Campaign.

She recently launched a Pollution Tagging App called iPollute, which is free to use and download anywhere. This app allows global users to tag, add, edit, and report areas in and around their community that has been polluted or littered. This makes it easier for professionals, municipalities, and volunteers to locate, report, and resolve issues regarding these pollutants.

She also started her own community organization Climate First South Africa, where we focus on fighting for climate justice locally and nationally throughout South Africa, leading climate campaigns, and she is planning to soon launch monthly campaigns where we go to schools to teach climate education.

Find Christine Coomans on:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChristineCooman

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christine_coomans/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/christine.coomans.581

Erik Solheim served as a Norwegian Minister of Environment and in International Development from 2005 to 2012. He has been chair of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (the main body of world donors) as well as Executive Director of UN Environment. He led the peace efforts in Sri Lanka as the main negotiator of the peace process and played a pivotal role in peace efforts in Nepal, Myanmar, and Sudan. Currently, he is a senior adviser at World Resource Institute and Convener of the Global Coalition for Green Belt and Road and serves as the CEO of the Plastic Revolution Foundation. He is also an adviser to Singapore-based April/RGE and co-chair of Tree-lion, an Asian green blockchain company. He is also a member of the Green Party in Norway.

To know more about him:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Solheim

Nirere Sadrach is a Ugandan environmental and climate activist and a growing social entrepreneur. He is also the  Founder of the #EndPlasticPollution Initiative.  He is a  coordinator and member of Fridays For Future Uganda, a green campaigner and a volunteer with Green Climate Campaign Africa.

Through the #EndPlasticPollution Campaign, over 16 companies have been profiles as polluters in 16 rounds of brand checks. With his team they are working in 6 communities with 152 individual participants. They are now working on a project to use disposed plastic bottles to construct water tanks for schools, hospitals and selected public spaces.  

He holds knowledge in business growth and entrepreneurship, sustainability, development, international trade and skills in digital communication and sharing climate information.

 He is a fresh graduate with a bachelor’s graduate in International Business and a continuing Connoisseur level learner at the World Bank Group’s OLC. He is a learner at the International Trade Center’s SME Trade Academy and holds a diploma in Sustainable Business from the Saylor Academy in Washington DC and an advanced certificate in entrepreneurship without borders from Politecnic Di Milan and UNCTAD. He has taken learning in how to achieve Sustainable development goals with the UN-SDG Academy. Nirere is also a member and a learner with the Young African Leaders Initiative.

 He publishes a digital series of articles on his platform www.climatewatchseries.blogspot.com.

Find him on-

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nirere-sadrach-profile 

Twitter: www.twitter.com/sadrachnirere 

Facebook: www.facebook.com/sadrach256

Kaossara Sani is the Founder of AFRICA OPTIMISM and Co-Founder of the Act-On Sahel movement. She is working hard to promote peace through her climate actions. She is also a Global Climate Justice Leader. She is working to promote peace in the Sahel region with the Act-On Sahel campaign. The Sahel region is the most vulnerable region in Africa and in the world. That is why as a youth for peace, she wants to put some pressure on our leaders to redirect the military budget to tackle climate change, conflicts, terrorism, and poverty in the Sahel region of Africa.

She is working with her fellow climate activists from Sahel countries to help farmers easily adapt to the climate crisis by providing them seeds. Her passion for humanity is motivating her to continue her fight for climate justice for the most vulnerable people around the world.  She is also raising her voice to advocate for the Yemen crisis which is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

Check out her website: https://actonsahel.net/

Vikrant Tongad is a self-trained and passionate water conservationist based in Greater Noida (Uttar Pradesh). He started working on various ecological issues in the year 2010 during his college days. His main concern at that time, and even now, has been the fast receding groundwater table of Noida and Gr. Noida as reflected in various Central Ground Water Authority (CGWA) reports and news articles. He observed, over the years, that this crisis is largely man-made.

Initially, he noticed a significant amount of water wastage through domestic borewells. In his own village, Kheri-Bhanauta, he saw that out of total 1000 households, over 50% were using borewells day in and day out, without realizing that this resource is exhaustible. Vikrant was only 20-years-old when he first formed a team of children and youngsters to sensitize villagers on the issue. He also took out a “water rally” in his own village and nearby areas for this purpose. After the rally, a lot of people, mainly youth, joined his ‘save water’ campaign.

Further during the campaign in the year 2012-13, he realized that a huge amount of groundwater is pumped out by real-estate developers to create basements for multi-story buildings, and poured down the drain. In fact, as per one estimate, the amount of water thus wasted in just one day in Noida and Gr. Noida is equal to water used by the locals of that area in an entire year!

Vikrant approached many govt. departments and courts to stop this wastage. Finally, his efforts bore results, and groundwater extraction for construction work was banned in Noida and Gr. Noida in January 2013. Several million liters of groundwater have since been saved and gradually, over 500 real estate site developers switched to using treated water from Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs) for construction work. Additionally, the local authorities earned revenue in crores by selling this treated water. This was the first big “water victory” for Vikrant.

Later that year, in July 2013, he established his NGO SAFE with few other socially-conscious friends. The aim was to take environmental issues forward in a professional and organized way.

Rebecca Woodward is a professional in public health/health research. She has been a community organizer in a local climate group for about the past 7 years. She does nature photography as a hobby. In her climate group, she has been on the state leadership team, a trainer, and a public speaker.  Rebecca is interested in climate communication and organizing as well as experimenting with climate communication on social media, including videos. She has been involved in a lot of campaigns over the years, such as passing local initiatives in her town to set emissions reduction targets. At the state level, she supported a variety of actions such as opposition to a local gas compressor station, state legislative initiatives, drawing attention to the harm of natural gas & gas leaks, etc. She also does a lot to support allies, including organizing to stand in solidarity with youth for the Boston Climate Strike in 2019, which is what led to the awards ceremony participation. Rebecca says that in local communities, people work together to form collective power to press for those changes with their local governments. Her personal initiatives such as encouraging people to be #louderandbraver in their efforts, trying to help more people understand #globalclimatejustice, helping create spaces for #climategrief, seeing that #climateaction comes from love, has really helped out in making people aware of these climate issues. 

Gerald Kutney is Managing Director of Sixth Element Sustainable Management, a renewable energy technologies consultancy. Gerald is a commentator on MSM and social media on the politics of the climate crisis. He has authored the book Carbon Politics and the Failure of the Kyoto Protocol and is currently working on #ClimateBrawl: the Politics of the Climate Crisis.

Gerald is also known for having inspired the popular hashtag on Twitter: “#ClimateBrawl.” On Twitter, he is ranked in the top 100 global influencers in Climate Science & Forecast, and the #1 global influencer for “Education & Public Awareness in the #ClimateChange Debate.”

He has a Ph.D. in chemistry and is an elected Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. He was an adjunct professor at the University of Northern British Columbia and taught the graduate course Climate Change & Global Warming. Now living in Ottawa, he has presented several guest lectures at Carleton University on climate change denial.

Click on the link to know more about him: https://g.co/kgs/CAHR9h

In the highly polluted Indian capital that witnessed an alarming increase in air pollution recently, a young man wearing an oxygen mask and carrying a 20-liter plastic water bottle strapped to his back is an unusual attraction. The oxygen mask's transparent tube is looped and fitted to the bottleneck of the water jar. From outside one can see an artificial tree in full bloom and water inside the bottle. It appears as if the man is breathing oxygen from the bottle that otherwise is used by people in most Indian cities to carry purchased drinking water home. Standing in the middle of the busy road on a pavement in Noida - on the outskirts of Delhi - as honking vehicles move past, the young man holds a placard to the passersby."Plant tree. Save a tree. Otherwise, this will happen in future," reads a message in Hindi and English on the placard. Cars and other vehicles usually sped past him without looking. However, when the traffic lights at the nearby signal show red, those who stop close-by avidly look at his placard. Some smile, some make facial gestures and quite a lot move their heads to the other side ignoring him. The man in his late 20s is Mr. Pankaj Kumar from the eastern state of Bihar. For the past 2 years, Pankaj has embarked on a self-chosen mission to raise awareness among people in Delhi about the pollution and the importance of trees and a clean environment. Every day he straps the bottle to his back and wears the oxygen mask to roam around Noida, the emerging commercial hub bordering Delhi.

Mr. Shrey Saxena is a second-generation social entrepreneur at Growdiesel. He is an engineer and one of the top global applicants to be shortlisted at Stanford University for his professional education. His first stint with social entrepreneurship was at the age of 14 in the computer lab of Cambridge School. His venture generates an additional 6 figure revenue for the school every year since 2013. He is an internationally recognized public speaker and has worked with various organizations in the past since the age of 18. He has taken multiple sessions on social entrepreneurship and communication at various organizations such as HCL, Adobe, Monotype, Stanford, IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, IIM-Calcutta, IIM-Shilling, Sonalika tractors, Amity University, etc. He has served as an area director for non-profit District 41, Toastmasters International which caters to North India, East India, North-East India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, and has mentored over 50 individuals personally. In his tenure with the organization, he has helped to raise a 7 figure revenue for the organization. He has worked with Red Bull as a marketing and branding specialist and handled their activities in 4 European countries namely Spain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. He was among the top 6 people from India to be selected for this campaign. He also shaped a social initiative by HERO cycles in which volunteers from 15+ countries participated in order to educate 2000+ children on cleanliness in the villages of Himachal Pradesh. He has always believed in innovations that can change the lives of people. At Growdiesel, he feels blessed to fight climate change through actions by converting waste into biofuels.

Link to his website: https://growdiesel.com/