This is LEAD India’s latest and most ambitious project to address the challenges of Climate Change. It has been observed that there is a gap between the climate change needs at the regional and local level and the national thinking and policies. This is largely due to lack of leadership at the regional and local levels. The CCL program is aimed at addressing this concern by building a cadre of leaders in different regions of India from all key stakeholder groups and across various sectors (agriculture, forestry, freshwater, fisheries etc). We will help identify, train and mentor these influential members of their communities to facilitate action plans that bring forth regional priorities/concerns to policy-makers at the national level. LEAD India will identify the 60 climate leaders at grassroots level from Indian Himalayan region and train them to work for sustainability of the Himalayan ecosystem. The project will then be spread to different regions of the country as well as across the world through our partner organizations.

Building Leadership around Climate Change

To create Leaders committed to Climate Change and sustainable development, a one-year
Leadership Training on Climate Change has been designed keeping in mind our flagship cohort training programme. The theme for training this year’s Cohort 13 associates is “Building Leadership around Climate Change”. The training curriculum is divided into four training sessions of which two are National Training Sessions, one Virtual Training Session and one International Training Session. The specific themes for the two National training sessions held in April and July this year were ‘Climate Change and Social Responsibility’ and ‘Climate Change and Energy’. The International Session to be held in Mexico in November 2008 will focus on ‘Mega cities and Climate Change- Sustainable Cities in a Changing World’.

Voluntary Carbon Market

LEAD India has realized that it is important to build awareness and capacities of the community through trainings by initiating interventions in the process of mitigating climate change. LEAD India is planning to initiate a network for Voluntary Carbon offsets by involving NGOs working with society at grassroots level through a programme to familiarize
local heads with the concepts of the Clean Development Mechanism and the Voluntary Carbon Markets. The objective is to enable people working on the ground level in rural areas to identify projects with the potential to generate Carbon Credits. They learn the basic steps to be followed in developing CDM projects as well as implementing projects that would provide sustained development, improved livelihoods and a cleaner environment to the local people. As the pilot programme held in Pune in May proved to be very successful, it is currently being replicated with local level organizations across the country.