How Three Young Women Are Nudging Energy Systems in Asia Towards More Just Transitions

First published at Catalyst Now: Igniting Systems Change

Energy transition discourse globally is dominated by megawatts, emerging technologies, grid economics, and men. When three young women were given the freedom to design real-world interventions in their home energy systems in Mongolia, Nepal, and Taiwan, they each found a leverage point [1] or places to intervene that considered building just energy futures.

For context, I have been teaching the new Systems Transformation Pathway [2] at UWC Atlantic College, designed in partnership with the International Baccalaureate (IB). The students are grouped into five impact areas: Food, Water, Energy, Biodiversity, and Migration, and I have been co-leading the Energy impact area over the last two student cohorts.

This article sheds light on the journey of three 17–19-year olds who followed a Cynefin-informed process [3] to probe and sense their local energy system, identify a systemic problem and possible interventions, build stakeholder relationships, and intervene with tools to support change towards more just and regenerative futures. These examples also showcase how education itself can be redesigned to center youth agency and action within the formal curriculum while making systemic changes in their contexts.

Oyunbolor Khugjilt, Mongolia

Ulaanbaatar is the world’s coldest capital city, and every winter its 1.6 million residents breathe air with PM2.5 levels (fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers that can penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream) routinely ten times the WHO limit. This contributes to around 4,000 premature deaths a year and ongoing health issues for tens of thousands of citizens [4]. At the surface, the pollution appears to emanate from the ger districts on the city’s edge, where roughly 160,000 households without grid access burn raw coal to stay warm during the winter [5].

Oyunbolor probed deeper into the structures affecting this high density of off-grid dwellers. Through interviews and a PESTLE analysis [6] in her context, she found out that rapid urbanization and lack of jobs in rural areas were driving a number of farmers towards the city, but enough infrastructure had not yet been built to support them. She was also surprised by the lack of renewable infrastructure in her country, given the open lands for wind and solar. Probing still deeper through interviews, she learnt about the dominant narrative, which framed her aim:

“Coal is the only choice of fuel during the winter time for families who need to buy such external fuels.”

Comparing coal and biopellets, a compressed form of biomass fuel that can be manufactured from readily available agricultural waste or animal dung (agral), she found that biopellets possess an energy density of 17–19 MJ/kg and negligible sulfur content (<0.1%), whereas bituminous coal provides a higher density 24–32 MJ/kg but contains significantly more sulfur (1–3%), leading to higher pollution levels [6–9]. This implies that getting the same warmth from biopellets requires 1.5× more fuel by weight but produces roughly 13× less sulfur. Despite the large availability of argal, she found few manufacturers of biopellets in her region.

Fig. 1. Outskirts of Ulaanbaatar. By: Oyunbolor Khugjilt. 2025.

Determined to demonstrate her case through a prototype, Oyunbolor managed to source argal from rural livestock sources, rented a small pellet press in Ulaanbaatar, and produced pilot batches of biopellets, which she distributed to five volunteer families, each receiving one full day’s fuel for testing (40 kg). All five families found the pellets effective and culturally familiar, as argal is embedded in nomadic heritage.

With a community-based approach where communities come together to invest in a biopellet manufacturing unit and supply of raw materials, she hypothesises it’s possible to keep the price of 1.5 kg of biopellets at parity with 1 kg of coal to remove economic barriers and drive conversion rates. That is her next challenge as she heads to university to pursue a bachelor’s in chemical engineering alongside her changemaking work.

Sahara Shrestha, Nepal

Nepal generates 99% of its electricity from hydropower (~11% of its total energy production) [8]. That’s the first statistic that impressed Sahara about Nepal, and she wondered, “Why don’t more people know about this?” She also learnt that Nepal has the technical potential to produce more, but only 4% has been tapped [11–13]. Furthermore, existing plants suffer routine damage from poor design and climate-exacerbated floods, including $19 million in damage to the country’s largest plant in a single storm last September [14]. Her sensing process led her to discover Hydro Lab, a research organisation in Nepal capable of performing physical hydraulic model studies that prevent such failures [15].

When browsing their website, she noticed that the information was not very clear and started wondering about whether the problem of people not viewing Nepal as an expert in hydropower stems from poor communication design. She contacted the owner of Hydro Lab and offered to apprentice herself to the communication design of their website, which had not been substantively updated since 2005. Working onsite with the Head Researcher and Manager in July 2025, she walked the modelling facilities with the engineers to understand the work well enough to communicate it. She used her insights to rework Hydro Lab’s website, improving the copy across every page, replacing dense text with visual and video content.

Fig. 2. Picture (Before) and screenshot (After) of Hydro Lab’s homepage. By: Sahara Shrestha. 2025.

She frames her aim modestly:

“To present the information in a more understandable way so that Hydro Lab’s work is amplified.”

When she presented to the senior leadership team at the close of July 2025, they were impressed with her work, and the changes were implemented. Sahara is satisfied that she could amplify the work of Hydro Lab, with the vision that if more clients utilize their services, Nepal could slowly become visible as an expert in hydropower, and also attract the investment needed for more climate-resilient infrastructure.

Daphne Chang, Taiwan

Taiwan imports approximately 94% of its energy, with fossil fuels accounting for over 90% of its primary energy supply [16]. The semiconductor industry is the nation’s largest industrial consumer, currently accounting for approximately 20% of Taiwan’s total electricity consumption, only projected to increase [17]. To meet 2050 net-zero targets, the state requires land for renewables like hydro, wind, and solar. While sensing the system, Daphne encountered the Zhiben Wetlands solar conflict, a case where green energy collided with Indigenous land sovereignty [18]. Although the Indigenous Peoples Basic Law is meant to ensure free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), state-centric administrative procedures were used to manufacture a narrow consensus [19]. This was exposed by the Katratripulr tribe, and the project was stalled. Motivated by this successful legal stalemate, Daphne understood that a “just transition” is impossible if the people living on the land are excluded from the decision-making process.

“In the beginning, the energy space seemed impossible to tackle without funding, but looking at it from a more social and cultural perspective gave me hope for change in a different way.”

Daphne changed her focus from a possible infrastructure intervention to a narrative one to amplify stories of community participation in just energy transitions. She worked with an Indigenous environmental school in Pingtung, close to her grandmother’s hometown, built after Typhoon Morakot destroyed the original Paiwan and Rukai villages. Inspired by the Learn Through Stories project [20], she conducted a three-day workshop with seventeen students aged ten to twelve to co-create a storybook on what their own energy futures should look like. She brought in multiple actors, an award-winning Taiwanese storybook writer to introduce the process of creating a storybook, a solar-energy company manager to talk about the technological aspects, and a village elder who taught the children the Paiwan story of how the sun got its light and how to draw it using indigenous patterns.

Fig.3. Workshop at Evergreen Lily Elementary School, Pintung. By: Daphne Chang. 2025.

The students co-created three stories. One story featured the character Vuvu, the Paiwan word for grandparent, as a key decision-maker, showing tribal meetings as the community’s decision space, and the Taiwan japalure, a lizard native to the school grounds, as the protagonist to emphasize the more-than-human aspects of human decisions.

Through this engagement, Daphne critically examined the ethics of intervening in Indigenous territories as a non-tribal outsider. In the context of our work in systems transformation, this involved co-designing the process with the school’s leadership. This approach role-modeled the idea that participatory processes are a necessary condition for youth to author their own futures. Currently in production, the storybook is intended to serve as a reciprocal gift to the school library and spread to other libraries, while amplifying Indigenous youth perspectives within Taiwan’s broader discourse on a just energy transition.

Key Takeaways

What makes me proud about all three interventions is that Oyunbolor, Sahara, and Daphne are taking action, not with technocratic solutions, but with consideration of what a just transition means. Oyubolor is solving a pressing health problem with a nature-based solution, Sahara is shifting the narrative of Nepal as an expert in hydropower, and Daphne is highlighting stories of the tension between indigenous land rights and the need for energy security.

When I first took on the role of steering teenagers through systems change, I kept thinking back to my younger self. How affected I was by inequality and environmental degradation in Mumbai city, and feelings of helplessness. After working with about 75 students over the past two years, I see how many nudges can stack up as vectors of change to make noticeable differences, both to their inner lives and the systems around them. I have seen students inhabit diverse roles outlined below and gain real-world skills to move beyond passive observation by understanding systems, designing interventions, mobilizing resources, and amplifying change.

Fig. 4. 12 System Change Roles Young People Can Play, Today. By: Jaya Ramchandani. CC-BY-SA-NC. 2026. [21]

The IB intends to make the course available to all IB Diploma Programme schools by 2030 [22], and it is only a matter of time before more young people will gain both time and agency to make changes at micro, meso, and macro scales in the systems around them to create the world they want to live in. I cannot wait.

Peer-reviewed & Edited by:

Raïsa Mirza, Systems Change Consultant at WabiSabiJetty & Senior Director of Global Programs at Legado Initiative

Robin Sharma, Research Consultant, Learning Design Collab

Explore the work

• Systems Transformation Pathway

References

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