2022 Middle School Winners

Sadhana Vijay was in the 8th grade when she submitted her video, and is now in the 9th grade at Tagore International School East of Kailash in New Delhi, India. Sadhana was interested in climate change and had done some competitions before, so she wanted to participate in the World of 7 Billion contest. She said, “since I live in India and agriculture is such an important part of the culture and my daily life, I thought I should make a video.” She was aware of the impacts of population growth prior to creating her video, but didn’t realize how much it impacted our daily lives and “how it will be a huge disaster in the future if we don’t do anything about it.”

This was Sadhana’s first time creating a video like this. She decided on the topic of sustainable agriculture and began researching the challenges and solutions. Her advice to future contest participants is to find a topic and solution that “connects with you personally.” Sadhana found it challenging to narrow down potential solutions because the topic of sustainable agriculture is so large. For next year’s competition, she would like to see sustainable consumption and production as a topic area because “we face pollution, specifically plastic, everywhere.” She emphasized the need for finding sustainable alternatives to plastic packaging.

In her free time, Sadhana is learning German and likes to play the keyboard, read, and paint. Her sister’s love of climate science and the environment inspires her and has fueled her interest in finding solutions for the environmental challenges that we face. For example, she recently wrote an essay on climate change that was published in a book, “Year 2 AC (After Coronavirus): A Future Imaged by Youth: 100 Essays by Young Indians.” Sadhana is also in charge of social media for the CORE campaign for climate change and disarmament at her school. She is not exactly sure what she would like to do in the future but thinks it will be something related to the environment.