Rishin Tandon is an ESPY Award winner, a winner of the Billie Jean King Youth Leadership Award as one of just three National Honorees, and the winner of the American Climate Leadership Award (Youth Category) by ecoAmerica. He is the 17-year-old founder of the patent-pending Youth Eco Sports Scorecard (YESS), a first-of-its-kind digital platform that functions like a FICO-style score for youth sports sustainability, using behavioral science, community-generated data, and youth leadership to measure, benchmark, and accelerate climate action.
Rishin was also one of six recipients of an Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program grant supporting innovative work in sport and social impact. He has delivered mainstage talks at the Green Sports Alliance Summit in Miami, became the youngest two-time global speaker at Play the Game in Tampere, Finland, and has been a guest speaker at NC State University and the University of Washington Bothell.
His work grew from original research examining sustainability across the 2018, 2022, and 2026 FIFA World Cups, including interviews with 12 global experts spanning sport, sustainability, academia, and World Cup organizing committees. He translated lessons from global mega-events to the grassroots through YESS, which turns everyday decisions from transportation and waste to extreme heat and air quality, into measurable climate actions, behavioral nudges, and data that can reveal where change is most needed.
Rishin’s work sits at the intersection of climate action, behavioral science, environmental justice, public health, and sport. His broader goal is to democratize climate leadership by giving young people the tools, data, and agency to drive systemic change through the teams and communities they already belong to.
