Amazon – Vaishnavi Sankar – 2025
Summary
Vaishnavi Sankar advanced the sustainability vision embodied by The Climate Pledge by designing a roadmap for regenerative cotton in India.
Goals
The Climate Pledge community seeks to collaborate across the public and private sectors to make meaningful change and drive progress in addressing climate change. To support this mission, Vaishnavi Sankar helped design a regenerative cotton program in India. The project aimed to map the policy and agricultural landscape, identify expert partners, and create pathways for transitioning millions of hectares toward sustainable, socially responsible farming
Solutions
Vaishnavi approached the challenge through three strategic tracks. First, she mapped 60+ policy documents and developed an 11-parameter readiness index to identify high-opportunity states for regenerative cotton. She also evaluated 10+ alternative crops, recommending soybean and sorghum as viable regenerative investments beyond cotton for India. Second, she designed innovative contracting models and premium pricing frameworks to strengthen grower-brand relationships and reduce information asymmetry. Third, she built a human rights and inclusion guideline for brands to address risks such as child labor and gendered vulnerabilities in cotton farming. She complemented this with guidelines for farmer training, emphasizing blended learning and local actor engagement. Finally, she identified 100+ expert partners and created an assessment framework to guide implementation.
Potential Impact
If implemented, the project equips global brands with a roadmap for regenerative cotton in India, advancing climate goals and human rights standards. The readiness index enables targeted investments, while alternative crop pathways diversify risk and enhance scalability. By embedding social responsibility frameworks, the program could eliminate child labor in cotton supply chains. With ecosystem-level training models and partnerships, the approach strengthens farmer capacity, ensuring both environmental and social impact across more than 10 million hectares of farmland in India.
