Climate Healers brings together action on climate change and poverty reduction with new technology and microfinance to help rural communities in India restore their habitats – and to help you tackle your carbon footprint. Founder Sailesh Rao will discuss his organisation’s plans for tackling the climate crisis and how you can get involved.

Climate Healer’s objective is to facilitate reforestation while minimizing fossil fuel use for cooking and lighting systems in low income neighborhoods throughout the world with a self-sustaining business model. According to their estimate, of the global population of 6 billion people, the richest 500m emit half the world’s fossil carbon. A significant fraction of the increasing CO2 emissions could be reversed and even a net carbon balance achieved if we reforest on a massive scale. Climate Healers provides solar cookers, LED lights and cell phones at no cost to people who are off the electric grid and pays them for using these devices. They partner with NGOs who work with these people on forest stewardship and pay the NGOs for maintaining Forest Stewardship Council certification of their village. Dr Rao will talk about the results their organization have seen over 3-4 years of passive reforestation, and will ask us to imagine the result if this method could be replicated throughout the world.

Biography

Prior to starting Climate Healers, Dr. Sailesh Rao was the Director of Communication Systems at Intel Corp., Director of Communications Architectures, Level One Communications, Inc., and was a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff, AT&T Bell Labs. He has over 50 standard contributions to the ATM Forum and IEEE 802.3 CSMA/CD Working group, and holds 10 US patents and 3 Canadian patents. Dr. Rao holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University awarded in 1986, a M.S. from SUNY Stony Brook in 1982 and B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India in 1981.

After watching former Vice President Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth presentation in December 2005, Dr. Rao made a significant change in his career. He became a member of Al Gore’s inner circle, which spreads the word of climate change, and founded the non-profit organization, Climate Healers.