Climate activist on 50-city UK clean-up tour calls for action above disruption

An environmentalist embarking on a 50-city clean-up tour of the UK has said climate action is about individual responsibility rather than “just screaming” for government action.

Vivek Gurav, 29, who lives in Wembley, north-west London, started plogging – jogging and litter picking – in 2019 in his home city of Pune, in western India.

His community has since cleared around 20,000 tonnes of litter worldwide via hundreds of campaigns, and in 2021 Mr Gurav expanded his efforts to the UK after moving to study for an MSc in environmental policy and management at the University of Bristol.

He launched his “PlogYatra” challenge, a play on the Hindi word for “pilgrimage”, last week in London and aims to jog and clear waste through 50 UK cities including Belfast, Glasgow and Edinburgh over the next four months.

Mr Gurav said that while he supports disruptive movements like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, he wants to tackle the climate crisis with more practical action.

“Their movements are great, I have been supporting them through my campus as well, but I want more people to be on ground and do something about this problem,” Mr Gurav told the PA news agency.

“Instead of just screaming, if they go and pick up rubbish or do some form of biodiversity conservation, it’s going to bring them closer to the green spaces.

“It’s not just about climate change overall, but it’s also more about the small things that are responsible for climate change, and that is individual action, people’s attitudes – we need to do something about that.

“(Disruptive protest) also brings a sense of refusing responsibility towards the environment and just blaming everything on the Government, which I don’t think is the only approach.”

Mr Gurav, who works as an environmental consultant in London, is encouraging university groups, NGOs and local communities to join him.

“The plogging movement that has been building up, it’s to bring such individuals together who are ready to go out there and do something from their own actions,” he said.

“Because simpler actions also create a bigger ripple effect.”

Mr Gurav, who started his plogging movement in his home city in India, says he was inspired to take practical action as environmental issues are a lot more visible.

“People in the global south, coming from developing countries, want to see some immediate action because it affects their life on a day to day basis,” he said.

“The air pollution levels in Delhi, when I was there in December, were extreme, and it was advised not to go out in the open spaces because it was that toxic.”

Over the last five years his plogging community, which on Instagram is described as the “world’s largest”, has been joined by thousands of ploggers.

He has completed a series of challenges including a 30-day clean-up across 30 UK cities in December 2022 and a similar 30-day challenge across 30 areas of London in the summer of 2024.

In 2022 he won an award from then-prime minister Boris Johnson and spoke at the 17th UN Climate Change Conference of Youth (Coy17) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, the youth version of Cop27.