Aakriti Pant (Nepal)
Young Climate Leader 2026, CEPS Ideas Lab

One of the biggest challenges for climate action today is that the people who live through the most intense climate impacts often have the least space and voice to shape the solution. I see this clearly in the fieldwork we do in Nepal. Children experience disasters, women face persistently longer hours fetching daily basic necessities and there is significant emotional distress long before these realities appear in policy discussions. Yet the systems built around them rarely start from their experiences, fears, or way of understanding the problem at hand.

My work in climate action is rooted in education, resilience, and lived experience. As the Co-Founder and CEO of ReGen Climate Lab, I design learning tools that help children continue their learning and stay emotionally steady when disasters disrupt their schooling. Over the months, our Crisis Response Playbox and offline Web App have reached 780 students and 46 teachers across three districts in Nepal. After a month of use, 87 % of students reported reduced anxiety, reinforcing how quickly early climate literacy can support emotional stability.

Beyond this, I also volunteer with Nepal Youth Climate Action, have contributed to disaster and gender research through the RYN Fellowship, and am publishing a study on women-led recovery after earthquake in Nepal. I also worked with Xuno’s founder on climate-linked remittance adaptation.