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The Unreasonable Regenerators: Reimagining Climate Resilience, Prosperity and Partnership from the Ground Up
2026-11-03 · By Pushpanath Krishnamurthy, Climate Justice Campaigner, Fairtrade Activist and Author
Climate justice campaigner Pushpanath Krishnamurthy explores how communities across South India are already building resilience through regenerative agriculture, fairer livelihoods, women’s leadership and locally led partnerships. Drawing on seventeen years of walking and listening, he argues that climate resilience and shared prosperity depend on shifting power, finance and opportunity closer to the people shaping solutions on the ground.
What if the answers to some of our greatest climate challenges are already being practised by those who have contributed least to the crisis?
For seventeen years, since my first climate justice walk from Oxford to Copenhagen in 2009, I have walked, travelled, listened and learned across Europe, South India and Southern Africa. More than 45 million steps, countless encounters, and the privilege of meeting and supporting extraordinary initiatives from Fairtrade and organic agriculture to natural farming, regenerative enterprises, women-led livelihoods and ecological education.
I have witnessed climate injustice in its most intimate forms: the farmer watching the monsoon betray generations of knowledge; the woman carrying the burden of declining household income; the artisan whose remarkable skills cannot compete with the ruthless economics of mass production.
But I have also encountered something profoundly hopeful: people refusing to surrender to circumstances, reimagining their economies, landscapes and relationships with nature.
I call them the Unreasonable Regenerators.
My recent book, The Unreasonable Regenerators of South India: From Soil to City, From Farm to Forest, follows these remarkable women, men and young people. Their experiences offer practical answers to the three questions before this global conversation: how to build resilience, create shared prosperity and work together.
1. Building Resilience: Begin with the Soil, Water and People
Resilience is not simply the capacity to withstand the next flood, drought or failed harvest. It is the freedom and capability to live with dignity, make choices and shape one’s future.
Near Srivilliputtur in Tamil Nadu, I met Rajkumar, a natural farmer who transformed four acres of degraded, invasive-acacia-covered land into a thriving landscape of companion crops, fruit trees and natural paddy. His work demonstrates how ecological diversity can become a form of insurance against climate uncertainty.
Near Bengaluru’s Bannerghatta forests, Vishalakshi Padmanabhan and the 16 Doddi Trust are nurturing another quiet revolution. Through Kai Thota, the traditional household nutrition garden, Lambadi and Vokkaliga women are recovering food-growing skills, strengthening household nutrition and gaining confidence and collective voice.
In Chennai, Karthik and Benisha of Aram Thinai are working to reconnect citizens with the wetlands, waterways and ecological systems on which the city’s survival depends.
These initiatives teach us that resilience must be ecological, economic and social simultaneously.
We must invest in living soils, restored water systems, diversified livelihoods, community knowledge and women’s leadership — not merely infrastructure that protects existing inequalities.
And we must stop treating vulnerable communities as passive beneficiaries. They are knowledge holders, innovators and indispensable partners.
2. Creating Shared Prosperity: Make Fairness the Architecture of the Economy
A low-carbon economy that reproduces poverty and inequality is not a just transition. It is merely an old injustice wearing green clothing.
In Madurai, I met Kishore Jayachandran of Kind Rice, who is attempting to transform a conventional rice enterprise through fairer farmer relationships, responsible production and a more ethical market proposition.
Krishnan and Gowri have developed cloth-bag livelihoods for women in low-income Madurai neighbourhoods, combining alternatives to plastic with vocational skills, income opportunities and children’s creative learning.
At Dibella India, Sreeranga Rajan is demonstrating another possibility: connecting organic and regenerative cotton farming with responsible textile production, fairer trading relationships and traceability from soil to finished fabric.
These are not charitable add-ons to conventional business. They are attempts to redesign how value is created and shared.
My earlier journeys among South India’s weavers, artisans and handloom communities reinforced another important lesson: off-farm livelihoods and regenerative agriculture are complementary forms of economic security. When a crop fails, diversified income can help protect a household from ruin.
Shared prosperity therefore requires fair prices, decent wages, accessible markets, affordable finance, secure livelihoods and recognition of women’s often invisible labour.
The question is not merely how many green jobs we create, but who owns the opportunities, who carries the risks and who receives the rewards.
Business can become a genuine force for transformation when fairness is designed into its supply chains rather than added to its publicity.
3. Working Together: Shift Power, Finance and Knowledge Towards Communities
Across these journeys, I have repeatedly encountered an extraordinary contradiction.
Communities possess imagination, practical knowledge and determination. Institutions possess finance, policy instruments, research capacity and market influence. Yet the distance between them remains enormous.
Rang De’s community-oriented social investment approach points towards more accessible, patient finance. The Covenant Centre for Development illustrates the importance of supporting producer communities and ecological livelihoods. The work of grassroots educators, women’s federations, natural farmers and social enterprises demonstrates what sustained local relationships can achieve.
The challenge is to connect these efforts without destroying their independence and creativity.
My book proposes practical priorities: identify and nurture local champions; expand assured public procurement; reward soil regeneration; stabilise markets for organic produce; provide affordable credit; invest in decentralised storage and aggregation; and recognise women as economic architects, not merely programme beneficiaries.
Governments, businesses, universities, financial institutions and civil society must collaborate through long-term, locally accountable partnerships.
Climate finance should reach the people doing the work, not disappear into layers of intermediaries. Success should be measured not only in carbon reductions but also in restored ecosystems, dignified livelihoods, stronger local institutions and greater freedom for women and young people.
We need to move from projects designed for communities to partnerships designed with communities and increasingly led by them.
From Climate Anxiety to a New Imagination
My seventeen years of walking have taught me something no conference room could.
The climate crisis is also a crisis of listening.
We stopped listening to the soil, the water, the farmer, the artisan and the wisdom of communities that have sustained life across generations.
Yet everywhere I have walked, I have encountered people who never stopped listening. They are already experimenting with a different economy — one grounded in regeneration, reciprocity, nonviolence and human dignity.
The principles of an Ahimsa Economy, an economy that seeks to do no harm, offer a compelling moral and practical compass.
As COP31 brings the world together, I offer one invitation to Business Fights Poverty and its extraordinary network of businesses, policymakers, campaigners and practitioners:
Come closer to the people already reshaping our future. Invest in their imagination. Share power. Build markets that reward regeneration rather than extraction.
The transition we need is not simply from high carbon to low carbon. It is from exclusion to participation, from extraction to regeneration, and from concentrated prosperity to shared well-being.
I have walked alongside many of these unreasonable regenerators. They have taught me that hope is not something we wait for.
It is something we cultivate, organise, finance, protect and walk towards.
The future is already being reimagined. Our responsibility is to help it flourish.