This greenie stands apart

Ritika Sharma / Emirates Business

Dubai-based Kehkashan Basu is founder of a youth sustainability organisation named Green Hope UAE, winner of NRI of the year award, has been a speaker at 45 United Nations and other international summits and has travelled to over 20 countries. Guess what makes her extraordinary – she is just 15. This UAE teenager was a keynote speaker at the New York Schools Sustainability Conference this week.
Basu, a student of Deira International School delivered a speech on the role of young people in the sustainability process at the Calhoun School auditorium in New York.
Invited as a keynote speaker to the “Sustainability Through Student Voices” conference , organised by NYSAIS ( New York State Association of Independent Schools), the event brought together young advocates of sustainability from various New York schools with the aim of bringing stakeholders from participating institutions together with the goal of exploring strategies to implement real systemic change.
Basu shared her journey which started when she was just 8 and emphasised the fact that ” We, the youth, have a leadership role to play and mould the future the way we want it.”
Highlighting the need for youth engagement in the sustainable
development process, she shared the numerous field projects of her youth organisation, Green Hope, on mitigating climate change , stopping land degradation , promoting gender equality and future justice.
On sidelines of the event, she told Emirates Business, “As a young person who has been involved in this process since Rio+20 , I firmly believe that realisation of the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals ) will require a time bound, transformative and universal approach.”
“The SDGs have laid out these ambitious targets and Local and national governments now need to ensure that there is an equally high ambition with regards to defining and mobilising the means for their implementation. Finance will be a critical component and it will require substantial upscaling to meet the particular investment needs in all the areas that the SDGs cover,” apparently confident Basu added.
Talking about her career plans she said, “I aspire to be a nuclear scientist and find means of harnessing the clean energy of the atom to solve the needs of our planet in a sustainable manner.”
Recalling the story of foundation of Green Hope UAE, she said, “When I was 12 years old (in 2012), I had the privilege of attending and speaking at the Earth Summit also known as Rio+20 in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. There were 50,000 delegates, heads of state etc at this summit but only a handful of children and I was among the youngest.”
“This made me realise that young people urgently need a platform through which they can voice their aspirations and views for a sustainable future. When I returned to Dubai, I founded Green Hope with a handful of friends and now it has grown to over 1000 youth members across many
countries.”
Basu, a winner of Hamdan award for Distinguished Academic Performance twice in 2010 and 2013, believes UAE is taking exceptional steps in moving towards sustainability as Dubai aims to be the most sustainable city in the world by the time of EXPO 2020 .
“This vision (EXPO 2020) can become a reality only if all sections of civil society take active part in the process. Young people , students are all part of the ‘future
generation’. It is our future that is stake and so it is imperative that we are deeply involved in changing our lives to a sustainable mode and influence our elders to follow suit. Students have the passion to drive change — we only need direction,” she opined.