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Cover Story
Like Swedish teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, Avipsa Mahapatra started as an enviro-activist in her teens. “I represented young people at the UN climate talks, where it was clear that despite a climate emergency, decarbonizing our economy would take a long time,” she said.
Avipsa Mahapatra Climate Campaign Lead, Environmental Investigation Agency, U.S. Key NatRef Accomplishment: Exposing illegal production and trade in climatedamaging refrigerants, and working on modernizing obsolete safety standards.
S h e j o i n e d t h e E nv i r o n m e n t a l Investigation Agency’s U.S. office in Washington, D.C., in 2012 “to rid the world of HFCs, as I view it as lowhanging fruit to buy us the time and climate space needed for large-scale global climate action.” As the EIA’s Climate Campaign Lead, she spearheads an effort that includes exposing illegal production and trade in
As someone who wants to do something about climate change, Christina Starr was drawn to working on the phase down of HFCs “because of the opportunity it presents to avoid over half a degree Celsius of warming.”
Christina Starr Climate Policy Analyst, Environmental Investigation Agency, U.S. Key NatRef Accomplishment: Working with sub-national actors on HFC reduction.
Accelerate Magazine // January 2020
In her job as Climate Policy Analyst for the U.S. office of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) in Washington, D.C., Starr focuses on research, policy analysis, and advocacy to support the phase down of HFCs and promote climate-friendly technologies like natural refrigerants, both internationally under the Montreal Protocol and domestically in the U.S. As the leader of EIA’s U.S. efforts, Starr has spent a lot of time over the past few years working with “sub-national actors,” who are “playing a bigger and bigger role in continuing to reduce HFC emissions,
climate-damaging refrigerants, working on modernizing obsolete safety standards and making a business case for natural refrigerants. She advocates for the use of sustainable cooling globally, from the U.S. to China and India. Mahapatra works on overcoming bias by not hesitating to “speak up and fully participate, without worrying about trying to ‘fit in,’” she said. “I’ve found that trusting my instincts, regardless of the mainstream view, is vital to enacting change over time.” Whether it is through encouraging diverse speakers at events and conferences, or not letting a female speaker be interrupted in a meeting, “I try my best to do my part in facilitating increased inclusiveness,” she said. MG
even in the absence of support from the federal government,” she said. These entities include states and cities as well as companies like supermarkets. In 2019, EIA launched a web platform called climatefriendlysupermarkets.org to highlight leadership by supermarkets on reducing HFCs. “We are also working [with them] to advance policies focused on improved refrigerant management and increasing recovery, reclamation and destruction of refrigerants at end-of-life,” she said. Starr’s team at EIA consists mostly of women (see Avipsa Mahapatra profile on this page) and she has female role models in government as well as on the industry side. There are still challenges, but she thinks the key is “for women to expect and demand to be taken as seriously and respected as much as any man.” MG