Punyajit Mishra (he/him), a Class XII student at Sai International School, Bhubaneswar, India, is a sixteen-year-old technologist, climate warrior and writer, whose work sits at the intersection of computer science, geospatial data, storytelling, and coastal community resilience. Growing up near the Bay of Bengal, where cyclones and rising seas shape daily life for fishing communities, he became drawn early to the question of how technology can translate environmental data into something communities can actually use and trust.
That question led him to found TideTales, a geospatial application that transforms coastal tide, sea-level, and environmental data into climate narratives rooted in local folklore, told in both English and regional languages. Built using Python, and utilising the Claude API, TideTales is now being deployed across 15 villages in Kendrapara and Paradeep, and is training more than 100 “climate champions” who use it to bridge scientific data and lived experience. He is currently expanding the platform into a full-scale AI model trained on hyperlocal climate data for climate communication. He deploys TideTales in the field as a Climate Intern with the Socratus Foundation for Collective Wisdom, under its Landscapes for Future Project. He is also the first Earth Ambassador-Elect for his school, as designated by The Earth Foundation.
Punyajit’s technical work extends beyond TideTales: he built EquiClimate, a tool mapping the gap between climate vulnerability and climate fund allocation across South Asia, and PlumeEst, an atmospheric pollution dispersion modelling tool built for citizen scientists without access to commercial software. He has contributed citizen science data to Earthwatch on Yamuna River pollution through the Ecology, Society & Urban Futures pathway at the UCL India Summer School 2026; he is presently working on ArcGIS-based landslide prediction research, and is also interning with Aurassure on climate-data applications.
Alongside his technical work, Punyajit is a poet and writer engaged with human-nature connection: his poetry has appeared in Once Upon a Crocodile in 2023, and his short story “Background Operations” was published by Scholastic India this year in an anthology by the name The Library that Forgets. His storytelling and technical work together earned him a Best School team Documentary Award at the Dadasaheb Phalke Film Festival 2024 and a Jury Appreciation Award at the National Climate Storytelling Competition 2025, NIT Jamshedpur. As a YLAC Climate Artivist last year, Punyajit advocated climate justice on social media thorough digital art.
As a member of the World Ocean Day Youth Advisory Council, Punyajit is honoured to represent India. Punyajit believes that the ocean and the communities along its edge are not separate from technology and data; they are what technology should serve. As a member of the Council, he hopes to bring that same principle to a global scale: building tools and platforms that let coastal communities everywhere tell their own climate stories, in their own words.
In his free time, Punyajit likes to code, write poetry, and explore nature photography. He can be reached at [email protected].