The Environmental Leaders Talk Series (ELTS) was a project that came to fruition during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown in Nepal. Almost everything around us had come to a sudden standstill overnight but we didn’t want to stop our work since the climate crisis was not going anywhere, with or without a global pandemic. Online based sessions were beginning to take off in Nepal and this was when we decided to do a series of informal interviews with climate change and environmental conservation young leaders in Nepal.

The leaders talked about their journeys which led to their environmental initiatives. In doing so, we wanted the audience to grasp that these leaders are their peers, regular people like them. If these leaders could do something about climate change and the environment, why not them? Over a year, we conducted four online sessions and one physical session with environment leaders:

• Sajal Pradhan and their solo journey cycling the Annapurna Circuit and setting up a rainwater harvesting company in Nepal
• Kushal Harjani and his prolific recycling company – Doko Recyclers
• Haushala Thapa and her research on the environmental damage caused by cotton production
• Climate Reality Leaders Mohit Rauniyar and Srishti Vaidya about the Climate Reality Project and the climate crisis
• Sanjeevani Yonzon and her innovative Green School Curriculum introduced in Nepal

Approximately 100 people participate in these sessions overall. A key initiative was to do a pre and post-survey to measure the effectiveness and learning achieved from these sessions. We found on average that having a measure of accountability, even if it was a simple quiz, immensely increased the audience’s attention span and overall learning takeaway.