Season 3, Episode 16: Vaibhav

In this episode of Climate Action Figures, John Whidden and Vaibhav discuss the urgent issue of global soil degradation, its impact on agriculture, and climate change. Vaibhav highlights the importance of sustainable farming practices and youth advocacy in addressing these challenges. He shares insights on soil health, the role of monoculture in soil degradation, and how more diverse, sustainable farming practices can regenerate healthy soils. They also touch on the significance of youth involvement in international climate negotiations and the Save Soil movement led by Sadhguru.

00:00 Introduction and QuickFix on Birds

01:20 Meet Vaibhav: Climate Advocate

02:30 Vaibhav's Journey in Sustainability

03:25 The Soil Crisis and Solutions

07:23 Global Movements and Policy Advocacy

13:59 Youth Involvement in Climate Conferences

19:27 Vaibhav's Personal Climate Action

22:05 Hope and Inspiration

23:34 Conclusion and Contact Information

https://www.birdscanada.org/

https://consciousplanet.org/en/save-soil

climateactionfigures@gmail.com
https://www.facebook.com/climateactionfigures
https://www.instagram.com/climateactionfigures/
https://www.youtube.com/@ClimateActionFigures

Transcript

Vaibhav 0:00

Hey everyone, it's Vaibhav and you're tuned in to Climate Action Figures.

John 0:13

Hello and welcome to a brand new edition of Climate Action Figures. My name is John Whidden, and this week on the show you get to meet Vaibhav. But first this week's QuickFix, which is all about birds, and comes from my mom. She's a big birder and also faithful viewer of the podcast. She has three ideas for you today: first of all, keep your cat indoors. House cats kill more wild birds than all natural predators combined. I didn't fact check her on that. I'm trusting you, Mom! Number two, move your bird feeders very close to your windows or very far away to help birds avoid a window strike. If the feeder is just outside the window, it's fun to watch the birds up close and personal. And number three, lots of birds mean our environment is doing well. Join a local bird count. Birds Canada has lots of information on their website. Go to the, you can help tab. Citizen science really helps to track birds and monitor trends in nature. And we will put that link in the show notes for you. So thanks for that, Mom, and welcome Vaibhav.

Vaibhav 1:23

Thank you.

John 1:24

what do you think about that QuickFix?

Vaibhav 1:26

I think that's super, super insightful. I didn't know that house cats can have such a huge impact on the bird population, so it's very insightful, thanks to your mom.

John 1:35

Yeah, and every now and then we have a bird hit the window. And I didn't actually realize that the distance that the feeder is away makes a difference. So there you go. Now Vaibhav we were connected by Harshita. Viewer and listener, if you don't know that amazing human being, as soon as you're done this episode, go right back and check out season two, episode 17. You will love it, I guarantee you. So thanks Harshita for connecting us and Vaibhav, how do you know Harshita?

Vaibhav 1:58

Harshita is a really good friend of mine. We are both youth advocates for Climate Action. Uh, she specializes on health, so she works in the intersection of health and climate. I focus on the intersection between climate and food systems. Uh, there's a lot of intersection between this nexus of health, food, and climate uh, so that's how I know Harshita, both through collaborating at large events, like say a COP. And also, you know, our friendship outside of these conferences because we're both from India, South of India.

John 2:30

Now Vaibhav you're pursuing your Bachelor's in Sustainability and Environmental Management at the School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, England. What led you there?

Vaibhav 2:41

I first picked this up and chose to come to England to pursue a full-time bachelor's in sustainability because, in school I was involved with several major movements, in India, environmental movements. And were mainly focused on, uh, reviving soil and reviving the health of farmers, both their economic health and their literal health, and how can we support farmers with the backbone of a society and an economy to actually revitalize, uh, river basins and the soil along the river basin so that the rivers are replenished because the groundwater is replenished and the only way the ground groundwater can be replenished is if the agricultural land is fertile.

John 3:25

Now is soil health a bigger issue, a bigger problem in India than other places in the world?

Vaibhav 3:31

Good question. So it's very, very dire all across the world. About 52% of global soils are degraded. Uh, this is according to FAO statistics. More than 65% of Indian soils by today. We in 2026, have less than 0.5% of soil organic carbon. Uh, that means that they are deserted on the words of desert desertification,

John 3:57

What should that number be at? Just so we have the idea of

Vaibhav 3:59

so

John 4:00

where we're at.

Vaibhav 4:00

between three to 6% soil organic content is good. The soil organic content or soil organic matter in soil, needs to be at a certain level for it to be called soil. Otherwise we would call it sand. Desertification is essentially when we go from soil to sand That process is happening at an alarming rate throughout the world. Unfortunately, most people don't talk about it because, it's not. As much in the public eye as are things like pollution from vehicles or air pollution or plastic pollution. So a large part of my work is to essentially get people, uh, my age younger than me, people, to talk about this and to learn about the fundamental problem that is soil. And the fundamental solution that is also soil. If we fix soil, how much of a change can we actually make? It's disproportionate to the efforts that we are gonna put into that.

John 4:51

Forgive the pun, but let's just dig a bit further into that and let me, let me ask you, what are the main causes of these soil problems. And in your view, what is the most important solution?

Vaibhav 5:04

Desertification of soil is being driven rapidly by agriculture and the way we're doing agriculture today. There are various factors for desertification in the world, but agriculture is a large portion of it. Most of it actually. So if we fix the way we farm today, if the, if we fix the way we produce our food today, can fix most of the desertification problem.

John 5:28

It can come back, it can rebound?

Vaibhav 5:30

Exactly.

John 5:30

And it's monoculture you're talking about in terms of the way, when you say the way we're doing agriculture, monoculture is the problem?

Vaibhav 5:37

Question. So there are. There are many facets that we're getting wrong all at once.

John 5:42

Mm-hmm.

Vaibhav 5:43

Monoculture being one huge part of it. But monoculture fundamentally implies what? That we are not having diversity in cropping patterns. Right? That is not the only problem. The way we farm fundamentally has changed. So initially we used to have animals on our farm, and these animals on our farm would be part of our farming system, now we've taken the animals away and put them in inhumane conditions and kept the farms free of animals and in straight lines for acres and acres, as you said, monocropping, we keep tilling the land, uh, until that is a large portion of soil that is left bare or open exposed to the sun. You might have heard of no-till agriculture or minimum till agriculture. There are only two natural sources of organic content, right? Green leaf leaf litter from trees and animal waste. What have we done? We've essentially removed all trees from our land so there is no natural leaf litter. When you keep taking away organic content through a cropping and you don't put anything back, you are systematically depleting the soil over a period of time. It reaches a point where no matter how much fertilizer you put or, uh, supplements you use, nothing will come out of the soil. And that will fundamentally impact our food security at a national level, at a global level. So the FAO and the U-N-C-C-D, all the major reports in the world are suggesting clearly that in the next 60 years we will not be able to feed our population the way we will need to because our soil will not be fertile enough.

John 7:19

Hmm. So you're giving us the alarm right now.

Vaibhav 7:23

This is essentially a large part of the work that we do at Save Soil. So I'm part of this global movement called Save Soil, Conscious Planet, save soil under the banner of Conscious Planet, and it's a massive movement that's been in force for the past four to five years. We work with governments, we work with UN agencies, we work with young people and we try to get this message clearly across that soil is dying and it is high time that we do something about it systematically from a policy lens, you know, top down, but also bottom up. How can we get farmers incentivized to make the switch from conventional agricultural practices to sustainable agricultural practices, right? How can we get them to farm better? How can we get them to integrate trees into their land, into their farming practice? How can we get them to integrate animals into their farming practice? How can we get minimum tillage, um, less use of chemical based inputs. And this, this movement is not against anybody or anything. It's not against a fertilizer company or a seed company, or. We need everybody to come together. A fertilizer company or a seed company is as important to stakeholder as is the farmer in this transition. Uh.

John 8:33

and that's tricky because their bottom line is so important to their investors and you know how that cycle goes. So how do we, work with a fertilizer company, seed company that might be hurt by a change in our approaches?

Vaibhav 8:47

A lot of large fertilizer companies, uh, I won't take any names, but the biggest ones, you'll see a clear trend of their shifting priorities in the past five to seven years. A lot of them are talking about sustainable agriculture. A lot of them are talking about funding, initiatives for small holder farmers to achieve self sustenance, It's a case that we have to make, not just from the bottom up, but also from a policy, uh, lens, and that's the kind of effort by working with governments, right? If you bring in regulation to say, like, we have building codes, right? In Canada and in the UK, wherever we have clear codes of if you're building a building, This region needs to be under buffer. This part of the land needs to be left for parking. This height needs to be maintained for the building. It should not be this close to the road. So there are clear codes of what needs to be done for a built environment, right,

John 9:41

That safeguard our future, essentially.

Vaibhav 9:43

And that safeguard the people using the land or using the building itself. Why don't we have something like this for agricultural soils? It should be fundamental to our food future and the future of our climate. So that's another thing I didn't talk about, we're on Climate Action Figures podcast, and I've been talking about food and soil, but how does all of this link to climate? Right? So most people don't know this, but soil is the largest terrestrial carbon sink on the planet, 27% of our global emissions, today directly link to agriculture, agrifood supply chains. So if we fix agriculture as a system, we can mitigate about 27 to 30% of all emissions, That's almost equivalent to all of transport or all of buildings. My point being, it's a hugely underrated solution to climate action. The amount of carbon we can sequester and lock into our land is is incredible. If you think about the potential of it, the beauty of agriculture as a solution to climate is that it's not just locking the carbon in the land, but when the carbon is locked away in the land. There are direct added benefits to the farmer in terms of economics, right? The farmers earn higher yields, and if we can associate carbon credits to those farmers. Then they earn money to conserve their land and to lock carbon on their land. If we can go a step further and associate biodiversity credits, which is the whole new space that's come up in the recent past, then we can get the farmer to be paid for the biodiversity, um, net gains that he creates through locking the carbon in his land. So there are so many core benefits that kind of domino into one another.

John 11:32

Thank you so much for giving us a little insight and education on that topic. And, uh, I'm sure some of our viewers and listeners have friends and family who are farmers. We do. So, uh, we will, uh, pass that message along and maybe share this episode with them. Vaibhav, you are a recipient of the prestigious Laidlaw scholarship for undergraduate leadership and research. Could you tell us a bit about that?

Vaibhav 11:53

It's opened up a, a world of possibilities for me as a university student. Particularly things like original research, with a professor of my choosing on a topic of my choosing. An immersion project in a different part of the world. So last year, as part of the scholarship, I was able to go to Mexico City, and work on urban climate impacts and learn about sustainability, uh, hands-on in the Latin American, uh, context, which is really valuable for me. Uh, I'd never been to that part of the world before. For me, the biggest advantage of the scholarship has been the network of people, mainly the US, UK, uh, Hong Kong, Canada. It's just been wonderful to connect with really talented, driven individuals, undergraduates my age, across great, uh, institutions in the US and, uh, and the UK and, and wherever else. Uh, doing a lot of good work on sustainability and I've derived a lot of value from that. I've even, uh, collaborated with them. On, on like different projects. One really cool thing that happened was, I, um, collaborated with a Laidlaw scholar at Durham University, and we worked together on a mock COP. So there's something called the SUAD Youth COP. It's a global challenge that happens where they simulate a COP for young people it's very high pressure. It's like a real COP. And they have negotiations that happen, um, on live call. And you have to prepare a position as a country you're assigned to. We were assigned Japan and that was such a wonderful opportunity as somebody working in climate, policy, to delve really deep into Japan's climate policy and the decarbonization strategy. And we won the competition. That opened up a possibility for my, for my colleague to, uh, join me at COP. I was going with Save Soil either way, like to represent them, but she was able to be fully funded to, to come to COP. It opened up a lot of tangential, very exciting possibilities for me. it allowed me to, um, to travel to COP in Dubai, in COP 28 so I'm very grateful that that's happened. Yeah.

John 13:47

Well, congratulations on all that. That's wonderful. You've attended a number of climate conferences, including COP 29 in Baku, as you mentioned, uh, last year or the year before. Uh, COP 28 in United Arab Emirates. We've interviewed a number of young people, particularly last season, who attended these conferences, and the unfortunate theme that seems to emerge is that youth voices are not exactly heard or taken seriously. Have you had that same experience?

Vaibhav 14:14

if you come to COP and if you're at these conferences, you'll hear youth itself speaking about the fact that youth tokenism is, is a huge challenge. Many times they give you the seat, but don't really listen to them or take them, take them seriously. My personal approach is not to get very activist about it. It's to see how we can actually, bypass that through in a meaningful way. I feel like in, in my personal experience, again at these conferences like SBs in, in Bonn in Germany or at the COPs, every time I have or a group of young people have actually had prepared a policy position or a youth policy brief and approached a negotiator of a country or a delegation of a country with actual asks, which are very meaningful, very well studied, very, the homework's done. They're more than happy to listen to you. Senior negotiators from countries dissociate when they think youth are being, belligerent and"activisty" for a lack of a better term.

John 15:13

I think we get the sense you're saying, come with some solutions so you're not just, uh, marching around...

Vaibhav 15:18

Yeah, exactly. What I'm trying to say is not that, youth should not be activistic. that is its own, um, what do you say, path. But when you're at a COP, uh, when you're in the blue zone, so there's a blue zone and a green zone, and so the blue zone is where the diplomatic, action happens. When you're in a space like that where people negotiating and people having very serious conversations about how to push the agenda forward, it really helps if you are in the same wavelength and in my experience of doing so, it certainly helped. It has certainly yielded dividends. It has certainly, been listened to by negotiators and it certainly translated into certain negotiators of countries incorporating youth demands into their statements at the actual negotiations. So I wouldn't say that it's, nil. I would just say the approach, if well studied and, and if we can integrate it into country demands, it's there. it's there to see.

John 16:12

Great advice, Vaibhav for young people who might be tuned in today to go to these events and go ahead and protest. But when it comes to maybe the more serious negotiations, the blue zone events, come with a plan, come with some ideas that could help solve the problem?

Vaibhav 16:30

Yeah, I agree. And I'd say it's not that I haven't seen, demonstrations or loud events happening in the blue zone, you can always, uh, speak to the secretariat and the organizers of the COP. And there's always spaces within the Blue Zone as well for people to organize, an action, a demonstration that is, is loud and that is visual. I was alluding very specifically to if young people are feeling like, their demands, very specifically policy demands, are not being incorporated in national positions. A lot of the times it can be frustrating that international negotiations, are slow moving, not not fast-paced enough, are very sluggish, but there are many factors that lend to international negotiations, right? Geopolitics and the pace of the world and, and the direction the world is moving in. So if what you're looking for is your demands as young person to be incorporated into national positions, then the way to go about it is maybe not demonstrations, but rather to speak to individual negotiators on the sidelines of negotiations. my experience.

John 17:35

Thanks for that advice. And uh, just before we leave this Vaibhav, you mentioned SBs versus COPs, uh, not all of our audience will know the difference. Could you just give us a quick delineation?

Vaibhav 17:46

Of course. So SBs, or SBI, technically is the subsidiary body for implementation of the Paris Agreement, under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is a very long abbreviation. So people just generally refer to it as SBs in the, climate policy space. But technically it'll be SBI because there are two, uh, subsidiary bodies, within the un framework convention on climate change. There is a Subsidiary Body For Implementation of the Paris Agreement, then there is a Subsidiary Body For Science and Technological Advancement. SBSTA. These two things happen simultaneously, but one is for technical advancement and one is for implementation. Sometimes it could be the same people, but they always happen in tandem. And so essentially even at a COP, what you're actually seeing is an SB and a SBSTA happening. At the COPs. Beyond that, there are many other negotiations that happen at a COP. The COP has become a much larger event than just what's actually happening there in terms of the negotiations. It's There's so much happening in the periphery as well, It's become a carnival and a celebration in many ways, which is very good because I feel it's wonderful that we make it a, a climate moment for the world to turn its attention to, and hold people accountable, people who make decisions. That's really great. SBs happen twice a year. They happen once in June and they call the June climate meetings, and they always happen in the UN headquarters. Uh, the UN Climate Change headquarters in Bonn in Germany, um, the second in the year happens at the COP, wherever the COP is held.

John 19:23

That's wonderful. Thanks for clearing that up for us and helping us understand. Now these are big, big topics we've been talking about. Let's, let's bring it down and focus on, uh, a smaller climate action that you've chosen for us today. What have you picked?

Vaibhav 19:37

The simple climate action that I am most proud of and I continue to do and I will continue to do is reaching young people's minds about this, right? On an everyday basis, I have the privilege and the opportunity to speak to young people, groups of young people, either schools, universities, all kinds of young people. But when I speak to young people, uh, like myself. I say young people like I'm old, I'm not old, when I speak to young people like myself, I really, really immediately see a spark in their eyes. I immediately see like the fact that they had no idea of what I was talking about, and now they know a little bit more about what they can do, on this critical issue that is soil, right? So me opening somebody's eyes to a solution, so simple but so profound and so important, um, is for me simply the biggest thing I can do at, at my level. I say this with a heavy heart, a lot of the youth policy action that we do at an international level, all of what we just spoke about earlier. So youth advocacy in an international setting, like a COP, it's very sluggish. Like I mentioned earlier. It it doesn't move as fast, whereas speaking to people at a grassroots level, actually convincing people that this is important. Raise your voice, speak to your leaders. Write letters to your leaders about the importance of soil and doing something on soil legislation. We need a soil policy. We have taken the responsibility to help millions of students be educated and also write to their leaders. And many leaders have responded, including the former, uh, president of the United States, Joe Biden. Many, many world leaders, mayors of of cities, have responded to these letters saying, yes, we will take decisive action on soil. We, we do think it's a problem. We acknowledge that many people are writing on this, to us. we pledge to do something about it. Many cities in the US, have declared soil day, in their cities. So it's really wonderful to see the, the reception, but now we need action. It's time to move away from acknowledgement. It's good that that's the first step, but now we need to move to, to actual action. So, um, I think that's my climate action.

John 22:02

That's a very hopeful, uh, action and message for us. So, uh, thanks for sharing that and that leads right into the last question we always ask, which is what gives you hope?

Vaibhav 22:13

Before any of this, the person that made me realize that this is a fundamental problem, that soil is an issue, and that made me realize that what I want to devote my life towards is to solve this problem that is soil degradation is, uh, a man called Sadhguru. He's the founder of the Save Soil Movement, he's the one who kicked us off. He is an individual, a yogi, a mystic, a visionary, from India, who has been working at the grassroots for over 30 years now, and he's launched some of India's most landmark movements in the space. And they've been significant in setting the standard for, revitalization of soil, as a global precedent. So, Organizations like the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, the U-N-C-C-D, and the FAO have lauded his movements in setting the bar for river revitalization or landscape restoration of soil. He's the person who inspired me, continues to inspire me to, work on this. He's the one who set this ball rolling. I think me and a lot of my colleagues we're all volunteers, I do this just because I see meaning in it and I, I see the urgency of it. And, um, so he gives me hope.

John 23:28

Thanks for sharing that and uh, introducing us to him. That sounds like a wonderful person in your life.

Vaibhav 23:34

Absolutely!

John 23:34

Thanks so much for joining us today, Vaibhav.

Vaibhav 23:37

Thank you.

John 23:37

And thank you dear listener and viewer. We love to hear from you. If you have something to say about what you've heard on the program today or in the past, please, drop us a line via social media or email. We're at climateactionfigures@gmail.com. We'll be taking a short break for a couple weeks. We'll be back at the end of February, same time, same place to hear from another climate action figure. Until then...

Vaibhav 24:02

go figures!