to all participants for submitting their photos and sharing their climate change stories!
Saleem is from a remote village called Cumbum. He has a Post Graduate degree in Biotechnology from Madras University, Chennai.
He is an active member of the IYCN-Indian Youth Climate Network and the Eco-Science Research Foundation in Chennai.
December 26, 2004 is marked as a black day in the history of mankind. Many lives and hundreds of acres of land were destroyed by the onslaught of a giant tsunami. This fateful event prompted me to write a few verses about the coastal tragedy when I was pursuing my undergraduate studies in 2005. The poem became quite a hit in my college. It reached so many people because I had put my heart and soul in to it, so it made others feel my emotions. After this experience I knew that I wanted to base my post-graduate research project on what I was so deeply moved by.
I have been involved in the rehabilitation of tsunami survivors and during that time I learned about the dying mangroves in the coastal areas of Chennai. When I went there I realized that this was also because of the locals were not taking care of the mangroves. I continued to do climate change research on coastal environmental issues in Urru-Kuppam, Chennai, one of the mangrove-degrading regions of Tamil Nadu. People there were not aware of the importance of mangroves and my aim is to raise the awareness with regard to its preservation and to take science to the society to combat climate change by growing more mangroves.
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