Imagine it’s the 90s in India, and climate change is still a new concept. A young journalist is covering stories such as the Narmada Bachao Andolan and reporting on the ecological impacts of agricultural chemical factories in Gujarat, the mercury thermometer factory in Kodaikanal, and other significant issues that have shaped India’s climate action narrative.
A few years later, this journalist becomes the Campaign Director at Greenpeace, holding major industries accountable for their environmental impact in Asia.
Meet Shailendra Yashwant, a senior communications and policy advocacy expert, currently working with Climate Action Network in his post-retirement years. This episode highlights the importance of conviction as the fuel for success, while also sharing essential skills needed to navigate a career in climate in today’s media landscape.
Below is an edited transcript that provides a detailed description of the guest’s journey:
Shantha Venugopal
Welcome to the Monsoon Academy podcast, a Transitions research initiative where we aim to help you map your climate journey through conversations with diverse industry professionals across the sustainability landscape. You will hear from seasoned experts who have worked on addressing climate issues in South Asia about what their day -to -day work looks like, what kind of skills you will need to be a competitive candidate for those roles, and to see the kind of opportunities that are out there. Let’s make the future green together. I am your host Shantha Venugopal.
Our guest today is Mr. Shailendra Yashwant who started off as a photojournalist covering news, sports, politics, and disasters in India and went on to become the Campaigns Director at Greenpeace. And now, working with international NGOs, CSOs, and governments as a climate communications and policy advocacy expert.
Shailendra Yashwant
Thank you, Shantha. Thank you very much. This is all very exciting for me as well. So congratulations on your new podcast and shoot, how can I help you?
Shantha Venugopal
So our first question is about how you have been working on climate campaigns since 1999. What is it like working on these campaigns and in climate communications? How has your work changed over the years?
Shailendra Yashwant
Thank you, Shantha. Let me actually start by stepping back a little bit to explain how I ended up working on climate issues way back in 1999. I must say I was one of the few lucky ones who came across the issue of climate change very early on. As you mentioned, I started off as a news photographer; I was a photojournalist and worked with The Times Group and The Hindu Group.
I mostly chased ambulances, covered disaster events, politicians, and sports. However, I was always involved in wildlife conservation and forest issues, even from my childhood. I had a deep interest in these topics. As a journalist, I would always take some time off to write about these issues, even though it wasn’t part of my brief as a news photographer. Thanks to that, I think it was in the late 80s or early 90s, while covering the Narmada Bachao Andolan, meeting Medha Patkar, and writing about the people’s struggle against large, destructive development projects for The Hindu and *Frontline*, that I evolved from being a simple wildlife enthusiast into a full-blown environmental journalist.
I was reporting on these issues, and in 1997, I was approached by Greenpeace, which at that time, and still is, one of the world’s biggest environmental pressure groups. What started as a photography assignment to document various toxic hotspots where multinationals had set up companies and factories that were polluting our water for products they were exporting, soon evolved into something more. I was soon collecting water samples, learning how to track dirty technology transfers from the West by researching multinational corporations and their wrongdoings elsewhere, and trying to understand what they were doing here.
For me, the exposure, training, and experience with Greenpeace allowed me to look at our backyard environmental issues from a global perspective. I began to understand that we were no longer just polluting our own backyard. Before I knew it, I was looking into unresolved toxic situations like the one in Bhopal, the dumping of toxic asbestos-laden ships for shipbreaking, pharmaceutical factories in Andhra Pradesh that were polluting our lakes while producing medicines for export, agricultural chemical factories in Gujarat, and the famous mercury thermometer factory in Kodaikanal. I was documenting these issues, working on them, and obviously looking at emissions. Climate change was still a very new issue for us back then.
For Indians, and particularly for our audiences in Asia, the concept of climate change was relatively new. My climate journey, I believe, began there in 1999, on the back of a lot of environmental issues.
Shailendra Yashwant
Sorry that was a long winded answer but I hope that helps.
Shantha Venugopal
Yeah, it definitely helps. From that story, I can hear the arc of your journey—from a passion for journalism and curiosity, making connections, leading you to an opportunity with Greenpeace, and growing from there. What would you say were some of the attributes or skills that were key for you to get to that position?
I think one top skill, over and above your education and everything else, is reading. Read, read, read—read as much as you can. Whether it’s creative writing, visual arts, or research skills, reading is crucial. Another essential attribute is curiosity, which is what made me a journalist in the first place.
Along with curiosity, you need another special skill—the ability to listen. Listening is extremely important in our work, whether as a journalist, an activist, a development professional, or someone working with communities. Listening is where you truly learn.
Empathy is also crucial. When I go to take a picture, write a story, conduct an interview, or describe a situation, it’s always about understanding what’s in it for them, not for me. Of course, I’m driven by getting that front-page picture or a headline story, but…
Shailendra Yashwant
…and nowadays, an opinion piece that will get lots of hits, etc., etc. But while that interaction is happening, empathy is key.
An adaptive, open mindset for change is also essential, especially in this field of work. You have to be adaptive, and you have to have an open mindset. Finally, and I say this to all the young people I speak to: anger, hunger, and courage. These are my three essentials. If you have empathy and curiosity, and if you see a situation, you have to be angry.
You have to be angry to bring that passion and put everything you have into it because it’s not just a one-off project. The work we’re doing in climate change is a continuous effort. You have to be hungry—hungry to reach more people, to find solutions, whatever you’re doing. And finally, you have to have that courage of conviction. This is not your routine job where you get a promotion, go through cycles, or work nine to five. This work requires a lot of courage. I know these are not your typical skill sets, but 30 years later, I think these have helped me stay in the game, try to have some impact, and most importantly, reach out to as many people as we can to talk about something as important as sustainability, climate, and future generations—because it’s all about you guys, Shantha, you know?
Shantha Venugopal
I think that’s a wonderful message, and although these skills are not easy to cultivate in an educational institution, I believe they stem from core values. That’s exactly what we want to highlight through our podcast: giving people insight into what it takes to work in climate and have that conviction.
After all these years of experience, what would you say has changed in the communications landscape today? In previous meetings with us, you’ve mentioned a supply and demand for communications experts. Would you say there’s a greater need for new skills or something specific that could really propel this industry forward today, something that’s different from when you first started out?
Shailendra Yashwant
Yeah, a lot has changed, Shantha. It’s amazing, and it’s so much easier now—and therefore so much more difficult. The number of channels has increased, and the ability to communicate in different languages with different audiences has expanded. Social media, in particular… Because I’m from a pre-internet era, when we started as journalists or even as activists or campaigners, we understood the old style of communication, which was one-way. I would do research, conduct interviews, gather everything, put the story out, and you would receive it. I would hope that you would act upon reading that story. All stories, besides informing readers, were also aimed at policymakers, decision-makers, and people who could actually bring about the change we were reporting on, exposing, or documenting.
Shailendra Yashwant
Now, having an op -ed in the Hindu or having a huge expose in the Indian Express or having a front page in garden about your international issue is not enough to reach to the audiences. I know of politicians that have stopped reading newspapers, they say we track everything on social media. They have these little apps that collect stories of their constituencies and their stuff.
Shailendra Yashwant
They’re getting a very focused set of stories. I think the challenge now has increased: how do we use these multiple platforms and stay on message? How do we understand the whole ecosystem of what influences a person? It’s not just one story or one op-ed; it’s a series of things. They’re watching something on their phone, something on their TV, reading something on the internet.
Meanwhile, some WhatsApp uncle has sent them a story. So, all these things together influence a person. I think that has changed, and it has become both a very exciting and challenging development, especially for creative people. They have so many platforms now. You might have had a photo exhibition at best before, but now there’s so much information people want to know, and they have only so much time and space. How do we…?
Shantha Venugopal
So would you say one of the primary skills is learning how to communicate using the mediums of today and making yourself as adept at getting a message across in a concise, punchy manner and hoping then that people will go on to resonate with the broader message.
Shailendra Yashwant
Absolutely, absolutely. I am, despite being cut off from, I live in a remote place, I don’t have much of a social life, but you can’t imagine the onslaught I have of information. And then I’m addicted to Netflix these days, so that doesn’t help. that is the communications challenge of this century.
The other challenge which I really want to talk about is disinformation.
Yeah, but so many channels and so many platforms and so many places that information is coming from, people are not able to separate the good information from bad information. And that has changed. We never had these problems. You know, at best, like the tobacco industry, they would put out advertisements that will say smoke is good for you, but not this insidious way of influencing people’s minds and their choices.
Shantha Venugopal
Yeah, the subliminal messaging and the misinformation and the disinformation for sure. So it becomes the job of the climate communications professional of today to find some way to bring the truth to light and to somehow make that truth appealing enough that enough people will pick up on that. That’s a heavy, that’s a heavy ambit.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And which is why, you know, when I going back to the skill set question, which is why research is so important, reading is so important, meeting people and going bearing witness yourself is so important. And as a communicator, you get to do all that and more and show off. You’re not like, you know, some academic who writes a long thesis, you’re getting to show off. You know, I think communications is the…
Shailendra Yashwant
most exciting thing to do out there today. I work with policy walks, people who work only on the policy. I work with events people. I work with different kinds of campaigners. What pulls them together? All the work, all the research that they do is useless without the communicator. Yeah. So that’s why I think communications.
Shantha Venugopal
You definitely make it sound exciting. So now that you’ve partially retired and you’re consulting, you’ve told us in our previous meeting that you’re living on a small farm in Kerala and growing spices with your wife. From that wonderful vantage point, looking back at your career journey, what would you say was the highlight?
Shailendra Yashwant
Hmm, I think what gives me the most satisfaction is seeing the impact of the work that has been done. You know, whether it was the shutting down of the mercury thermometer factory in Kodaikanal overnight after my first set of images was published and the campaign was launched, or the improvements in the environment and working conditions in the shipbreaking yards of South Asia because of those campaigns. We even managed to send back a warship, the Clemenceau, from France, thanks to that campaign—it actually turned back from our shores and went back to France for dismantling. The moratorium on peatland clearances for palm oil plantations in Indonesia is another example.
There are lots of small successes that add up to changes that, while not sufficient, at least allow me to sleep well, knowing I did my best and punched above my weight. I always feel that all of us strive to do that, but to have some impact—that’s what matters. Just knowing that the work you did actually brought about some change, bettered someone’s life, improved someone’s understanding, or helped someone make a better decision—that’s important to me now.
And Shantha, while I’m semi-retired, I’m still at it. I still do photography, I still write, and I still participate in various CSO and governmental consultations on strategies for the future.
Shailendra Yashwant
So yeah, it’s all built up on all the work that was done in the past and it continues because we’re living the disaster that we wrote about. I think it’s our responsibility to be engaged, to keep at it,not give up because if my generation gives up hope, your generation, the generation after has none left.
Shantha Venugopal
I know you call them small victories, but they are in fact huge victories. And I think here at our podcast on our team, we definitely believe that that’s the kind of professional we want to encourage, the kind that chases these changes, no matter what kind of obstacles are in the way. And because we have to live this future, we’re all very invested in it for sure.
Thank you so much for joining us today at the Monsoon Academy podcast. It has been so insightful to hear about your climate career and from someone who has been in this space for so long.
