🇮🇳Licypriya
Kangujam

In December 2019, inside the cavernous halls of Madrid's IFEMA conference center, where nearly two hundred nations had gathered for COP25, an eight-year-old girl from Manipur took her place at the podium. Licypriya Kangujam had traveled from northeast India — one of the most geographically isolated and climatically vulnerable regions of the subcontinent — and she stood before United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and handed him a memorandum. She had written it herself. It asked for immediate climate action. She asked for it in the language of a child who understood, with unusual clarity, that the adults in the room were arguing about frameworks while her generation would inherit the consequences.

Licypriya was born on 2 October 2011 in Bashikhong, Manipur, a state where climate change is not an abstraction. Manipur sits at a confluence of the Himalayan foothills and the Indo-Burman biodiversity hotspot, a region experiencing erratic monsoons, increasing floods, and ecological degradation with real effects on rural communities. She has said that witnessing a natural disaster in Mongolia during a family trip in 2018 — where she saw the aftermath of a dzud, the harsh winter event that kills livestock and devastates nomadic communities — was the catalyst that turned her concern into action. She was seven years old.

Upon returning to India, she began standing outside the Parliament building in New Delhi with a placard, asking lawmakers to pass a climate change law. The images of a small girl alone with a sign outside Parliament — which drew inevitable comparisons to Greta Thunberg, a comparison Licypriya has explicitly rejected, noting she started independently and represents a different geopolitical context — circulated widely on Indian social media. She founded the Child Movement, an organization designed to mobilize children around climate advocacy, and began a focused campaign to make climate change education mandatory in Indian schools.

Her attendance at COP25 was sponsored by the Government of Spain and the European Climate Foundation, which covered travel and accreditation. At the conference, she met Secretary-General Guterres, to whom she presented her memorandum on behalf of children from developing nations. Her message was specific: she asked world leaders to declare a climate emergency, phase out fossil fuels, and commit to keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The encounter was documented by multiple news organizations and broadcast internationally. She was eight years old. The symbolism was not lost on anyone watching.

Following COP25, Licypriya continued an intensive schedule of appearances. She gave a TEDx talk at Shaheed Bhagat Singh College in Delhi in 2020, where she received a standing ovation. She spoke at TEDxGateway in Mumbai in the same year. By 2023, she had delivered eight TEDx talks, including one at IIT Jodhpur. She attended COP26 in Glasgow and COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, where she spoke alongside delegations from the Global South about climate debt and the disproportionate burden borne by developing nations. She addressed the 80th United Nations General Assembly in 2025.

Her core campaign — climate education in schools — achieved a documented result when the state of Gujarat included climate change in its school curriculum. Whether directly attributable to her advocacy or to broader policy movements, the connection was noted by Indian media. She has traveled to more than thirty-two countries, spoken at more than four hundred institutions, and built a social media following that gives her climate messaging reach to millions. She identifies primarily as a voice for the Global South in international climate negotiations, a region that has contributed least to carbon emissions but faces the most severe consequences of warming.

Important context surrounds her profile: investigations published by ThePrint, Vice News, and the Imphal Free Press found inconsistencies in certain awards and accolades attributed to her, and her father, Kanarjit Kangujam Singh, was arrested in 2021 on charges of fraud and forgery. These investigations were careful to distinguish between fabricated claims and documented activities. Her presence at COP25, her TEDx talks, and her Gujarat curriculum campaign are matters of independent record. This page covers only what is verified. Her voice at COP25 — a child from Manipur demanding action in Madrid — was real.