Leena Joshi is an iconic, multi-award-winning social entrepreneur, bestselling author, and one of the most electrifying voices of her generation. Her name has become synonymous with youth-powered environmental revolution, and her leadership is redefining what it means to create systems change in the era of climate crisis.
She is the founder and Executive Director of Climate Conservancy, a global youth-led nonprofit with over 9,000 volunteers across 67 countries, mobilizing young people to lead scalable, intersectional climate solutions. Under her leadership, the organization has become a beacon for next-gen climate action; merging art, activism, science, policy, and grassroots action.
Leena is also the Chair and CEO of EcoVita, a cutting-edge climate-tech social enterprise at the forefront of regenerative innovation, impact investing, and justice-centered sustainability. Her influence spans industries, continents, and sectors earning her a seat at some of the most powerful tables in global climate leadership.
A commanding presence on the world stage, Leena has spoken at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Sciences Po and TEDx, and has been featured at premier climate and policy summits including COP, the UN General Assembly, and the World Bank’s high-level forums. Her work and voice have been celebrated by the United Nations, World Bank Group and many international media outlets.
As a Youth Stocktake Researcher, Leena co-authored the UNFCCC Youth Stocktake Report, a pivotal document that is reshaping youth engagement in global climate governance. She currently serves as a Research Advisor to Imperial College London, where her work on climate anxiety and ecological grief is trailblazing new global conversations around the emotional and psychological costs of climate breakdown.
A two-time published author, Leena’s books—The Climate Awakening and Ethereal are poetic, soul-stirring manifestos for a livable future. As a climate poet, abstract artist, and conservation photographer, her art has been exhibited and performed globally, translating planetary urgency into visceral beauty. Her work is a force of storytelling that transcends borders, merging aesthetics with activism in ways few others can.
From the frontlines of grassroots organizing to the epicenters of international policy, Leena Joshi is redefining the future of the climate movement.
Leena Joshi
Leena Joshi's Story
I was nine years old when I understood something that most people spend a lifetime avoiding: the environment is not a backdrop to human life. It is the condition of it. Growing up in New Delhi, smog was not a weather event. It was the weather. It pressed against your chest, settled into your lungs, and reminded you, daily, that the air you were breathing was borrowed and broken. It was not until a family trip to Switzerland, in my early years, that I encountered something I had no language for: air that simply existed, clean and weightless, asking nothing of the body that drew it in. I stood there and breathed, really breathed, for what felt like the first time. And I came home carrying a question that I have never been able to put down: why is this a privilege, and not a right?
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A few years later, walking along a coastline at dusk, I encountered the same logic playing out in a different medium. The sky was quiet, the light was soft, and the shoreline was buried in plastic. Not dramatically, not catastrophically, just steadily, the way neglect always accumulates. Bottles, fragments, the detritus of daily consumer life, all of it washing back to us like a bill coming due. What struck me was not the shock of it. What struck me was the familiarity. The ocean and the atmosphere are not separate systems. They are one conversation, and we had been responding to it very badly.
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I did what most young people with urgency and no institutional power do: I started talking. In classrooms, in group chats, on social media, wherever I could find an audience willing to sit with discomfort. What I discovered, quickly, was that I was not alone in the discomfort, only in the willingness to name it publicly. The conversations grew. The community grew. And from that momentum, I built Climate Conservancy, an international youth-led movement that now spans sixty-seven countries and is carried forward by nine thousand volunteers who understand, as I do, that urgency without structure is just noise.
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What has always distinguished Climate Conservancy, and what I am most deliberate about, is the refusal to treat climate as a single-issue cause. Climate is not a science problem that exists separately from public health, from gender equity, from cultural identity, from economic justice. These are not adjacent conversations. They are the same conversation, and any organization that does not reflect that reality will fail the communities it claims to serve. Intersectionality is not a rhetorical posture for us. It is the organizing principle of how we build programs, recruit leaders, and measure impact.
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Our chapters program is the operational expression of that principle: young people designing and executing projects that are native to their own contexts, whether that means mangrove restoration, coastal cleanups, or advocacy campaigns that speak the language of their own governments and communities. We do not import solutions. We build infrastructure for local intelligence to operate at global scale.
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Of all the initiatives I have developed, ArtSea is the one that people most often underestimate, and then do not. The premise is simple: art does what data cannot. It does not inform people into caring. It places them inside an experience until caring becomes unavoidable. Through ArtSea, young artists across our network transform public spaces into living arguments for ocean conservation, through murals, performances, exhibitions, and installations that do not ask for attention so much as command it. Conservation, at its most effective, is not only policy. It is culture. And culture is built by artists before it is ever codified by legislators.
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I share all of this not as a biography, but as an argument. The argument is this: the children who grow up rationing their breath in polluted cities, and the communities watching their coastlines disappear beneath plastic, are not waiting for the world to notice them. They have already noticed the world, and drawn their own conclusions. The only question is whether the institutions, industries, and leaders with actual structural power will move with the same clarity and speed that those communities require.
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The ocean has been making its case for some time now. It is a remarkably patient witness. But patience, as any serious person knows, is not the same thing as permanence.
