Tamil Nadu IAS officer Supriya Sahu was offered with the 2025 UN Champions of the Earth award for inspiration and motion, the United Nations’ highest environmental honour. She was recognised as a recipient of the 2025 Champions of the Earth award by the UN Surroundings Programme in Nairobi on Wednesday.
Sahu was recognised for her pioneering and long-standing management on important environmental challenges in India, together with plastics and wildlife conservation, a press launch stated on Wednesday.
Supriya Sahu, the winner of Champions of the Earth 2025 for Inspiration and Motion, stated, “My inspiration comes from individuals who stood by me from the native village, working with me to scrub up the mangroves as their very own. My inspiration additionally comes from these youngsters who look as much as you with the blink of their eyes.”
Who’s Supriya Sahu?
Supriya Sahu has served as Tamil Nadu‘s extra chief secretary within the Surroundings, Local weather Change and Forests Division for the previous 4 and a half years.
Based on her profile shared by the UN, Sahu’s love for nature began in her early childhood, when her household travelled across the nation for her father’s job.
She adores elephants, and her Instagram account is stuffed with posts about them. Sahu likes to say that elephants can train us about resilience, household bonding and management.
All through her 30-year profession as a public servant, Sahu has developed a rising fascination with India’s wealthy biodiversity.
Nevertheless, she has additionally develop into aware of the extreme harm that irresponsible human behaviour can inflict.
“I noticed animals consuming plastic rubbish, and I realised that our planet is choking. That have grew to become transformational for me,” Sahu stated as she recalled her time because the District Collector within the Nilgiris District.
Why was Supriya Sahu awarded UN’s highest environmental honour?
Based on the United Nations, Supriya Sahu was recognised for her groundbreaking management in subnational local weather motion, restoring ecosystems and scaling sustainable cooling improvements throughout Tamil Nadu.
Her initiatives showcased how built-in governance and nature-based options, together with a mixture of low- and high-tech interventions, can defend susceptible communities, whereas lowering greenhouse gasoline emissions.
“Her work has created hundreds of thousands inexperienced jobs and positioned the state as a mannequin for science-based, community-driven local weather resilience,” the UN stated.
Sahu’s sustainable cooling and restoration initiatives additionally expanded forest cowl, and improved resilience for 12 million individuals.
Supriya Sahu’s key works and initiatives
In 2000, she launched a marketing campaign known as “Operation Blue Mountain” geared toward eliminating single-use plastic in Nilgiris. The difficulty of plastic air pollution was nonetheless beneath the radar on the time.
In recent times, Sahu launched the Tamil Nadu Inexperienced Local weather Firm, a not-for-profit centered on coastal resilience, and quite a lot of initiatives to deal with city warmth and rising cooling demand.
Sahu additionally led the Cool Roof Venture, one of many passive cooling initiatives, which is being carried out in 200 public “inexperienced faculties.”
She additionally led efforts to plant over 100 million bushes and set up 65 new reserve forests in Tamil Nadu. Beneath her management, the state has doubled its mangrove cowl, expanded its wetlands from 1 to twenty, and launched the US$60 million Endangered Species Conservation Fund, the United Nations said.
In Chennai, Sahu is making use of this nature-first method to city planning.
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