- Wednesday, February 26, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
TWO teenage brothers from India have requested world leaders to act against climate change after bagging a prestigious global children’s award on Saturday (13) for tackling pollution from household waste in the national capital of New Delhi, AFP reported.
Vihan and Nav Agarwal, aged 17 and 14, respectively, received the 2021 KidsRights International Children’s Peace Prize for developing an initiative to segregate recyclables and organise pickups for waste from several households.
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The award showed the duo’s “courage and commitment to tackling pollution in their home city”, ranked as the worst in the world for air quality due to a hazardous mix caused partly by the burning of rubbish.
On Saturday, authorities in New Delhi decided to shut schools for a week and said they would consider a “pollution lockdown” to shield citizens from toxic smog.
The two brothers follow in the footsteps of previous winners, including environmental activist Greta Thunberg and Nobel laureate and Pakistani education campaigner Malala Yousafzai.
“Our message would be you guys need to act. So many children all around the world are acting,” Vihaan told AFP in a remote interview when asked what he would say to leaders at the recently held COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland.
“Another message would be: don’t get in our way,” he said.
“To all the young people… you should never fear climate change. You just have to take that one step, and when you do it’s just amazing the amount of change you as a one person can actually create,” Nav added.
Indian Nobel Peace laureate Kailash Satyarthi, a children’s rights activist who won the 2014 Nobel jointly with Malala, presented the brothers with the prize run by the Netherlands-based KidsRights Foundation at a ceremony in The Hague on Saturday.
The brothers said that growing up in Delhi affected the asthmatic Vihaan’s health and hampered their ability to play outdoors and indulge their love of nature.
The inspiration for their ‘One Step Greener’ initiative was triggered by the collapse of the Ghazipur landfill site in Delhi in 2017, which killed two people.
