By Saurjesh Chatterjee (Winner)
The climate isn’t just changing—it’s being rewritten, with all the subtlety of a typewriter dropped into a swimming pool, and the pen is in our hands.
For centuries, humans altered the environment bit by bit. Now, we operate on a planetary scale. Industrial emissions, once a whisper, now roar at 36 billion tonnes of CO₂ each year. This isn’t a distant problem; it’s an accounting crisis, and the balance is tipping dangerously into the red. Rising temperatures intensify storms, redraw coastlines, and destabilise food supplies. Heatwaves push human limits. Glaciers retreat in decades, not centuries. Satellite data, ocean chemistry, and shifting species all tell the same urgent story.
Local action matters. Urban tree planting cools cities. Smart irrigation saves water. Solar grids replace fragile fossil-fuel systems. These aren’t just gestures—they’re necessities. But the real battle is systemic. Energy must shift to renewables at the scale of past industrial revolutions. Farming has to respect nature’s limits, not just markets.
The challenge is complex, but complexity isn’t an excuse for delay. Civilisations have faced survival tests before-resource crises, epidemics, wars. The winners acted fast and decisively. People easily forget that this planet is all we have—all we’ve ever known is this pale blue dot in the vast universe, like dust suspended in a sunbeam. There is no Plan B and no Planet B. Even the idea of escaping to another world is far-fetched. We forget that we haven’t inherited this planet from our parents, but borrowed it from our children. The least we can do is preserve it for them.
Climate change is the defining audit of our era. The numbers are in, the margins are thin, and the next moves will decide whether we course-correct or suffer irreversible loss. Nature doesn’t care. Humanity’s survival depends on whether we do.
