By The Independent
Copyright independent
The grip of the climate crisis is tightening, with records continuing to tumble as the world heats up and the natural world suffers increasing harm.
Temperatures reached a worldwide high in 2024, research revealed, following on from the record set in 2023. The UK this year had its hottest spring and summer since records began in 1884, with multiple heatwaves causing droughts and wildfires.
In his inaugural state of climate and nature speech, the secretary of state for energy security and net zero, Ed Miliband, cited research that the UK had become one of the most “nature-depleted countries in the world”. He said: “These are uncomfortable, sobering facts, and we should make no mistake: we must act on the climate and nature crisis … because no sector or part of our society is immune from those risks.”
Outside of the UK, attitudes are different. Donald Trump’s scepticism has seen green initiatives rolled back, while reliance on fossil fuels has increased. Yet Florida just had the worst drought in 24 years, with almost the entire state affected, and the LA fires in January displaced thousands of people as their homes were destroyed and hundreds also lost their lives.
Even the Nordic countries have experienced extensive heatwaves this summer and scientists believe the rapid loss of Antarctic sea ice is accelerating the problem to tipping point, with potentially irreversible global consequences.
It may sound like a dismal state of affairs, but there’s always hope, as Sir David Attenborough revealed in his Ocean documentary that the ocean can regenerate itself. Aside from the broadcaster, there’s a whole host of people dedicating their lives to improving the environment before it’s too late, and making others see that we need to change our ways.
You’ll find many of them in the second edition of The Independent’s Climate 100 List, following on from the success of our first edition last year.
The list isn’t in order of importance, nor does it compare or rank one change maker against another. Instead, it’s a recognition of the people and companies dedicated to finding positive climate solutions. Some have made a splash recently with a notable contribution to the fight, while others are celebrated for their long-term commitment and contribution. We also asked you, our readers, to nominate five unsung climate heroes.
The publication coincides with Climate Week NYC – one of the climate world’s biggest events – where The Independent will be hosting its own Climate 100 event, including a keynote speech from Greg Jackson, the founder and CEO of Octopus Energy.
So, meet the inspirational people solving the planet’s greatest challenges.
Arts & Fashion
1. Abi Daré
Winning the first Climate Fiction prize in May of this year, British-Nigerian writer Abi Daré’s novel And So I Roar documents how the climate crisis also triggers social crisis. She unravels the effects of this on rural Nigerian communities, especially women and girls, deepening the inequality that already exists.
On winning, she told The Independent ,”it shows that stories from all over the world, from Africa, from Nigeria, matter. And that people have heard the voices of the girls because they were roaring in the book, as the title says. That means a lot to me.”
It also gives a voice to Africa’s climate narrative and that of the Global South too. As the continent contributes an estimated 4 per cent of global emissions, yet it bears a disproportionate brunt of the impacts of the crisis.
And So I Roar is the sequel to The Girl with the Louding Voice. In 2023, she launched The Louding Voice Foundation, which supports educational scholarships and empowerment programmes for women and girls in underserved Nigerian communities.
2. Edward Burtynsky
Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has used most of his photography career to powerfully track humanity’s disastrous environmental footprint. His work provides the urgent environmental commentary many can’t convey with words alone.
He focuses on sites such as oil fields, mines, quarries, and those that have suffered from droughts or deforestation and uses his lens to stir much-needed conversations of human impact. His images are often stark and positioned from a bird’s eye view, encapsulating the sheer size, made more damning by often including tiny human figures for scale.
Sometimes, his pieces might look like a study of colour or pattern, until it becomes clear it’s actually something much more shocking, like the remnants of an extracted copper mine and huge craters in the land and varying rusty colours.
His recent exhibition at New York’s International Center of Photography (ICP), The Great Acceleration, portrays the effects on glacier retreats, coastal erosion and industrial landscapes.
3. Arizona Muse
British-American model Arizona Muse is the founder of the charity Dirt, a non-profit organisation aiming to change the fashion industry by tackling its many problems from the ground up, literally.
Her focus is on soil health and regenerative farming and growing methods, after witnessing the fashion industry’s impacts from within. Muse now speaks out about the hidden costs of fashion on the environment and communities, including ethical and sustainability-related problems associated with exploitation. When she first started her campaigning, she says she lost a lot of followers, but set about engaging her audience in her message. She has spent the past decade highlighting the importance of regenerative organic agriculture, especially for growing the raw materials needed to make our clothes.
Muse is working to convince the larger fashion houses and brands to change how they work, and to not only prioritise revenue. Her vision is to bring the industry more in line with the food and wine sector, which has certifications and standards for produce made following environmentally conscious practices. As there’s nothing like it, Muse is working on her own set of standards.
4. Aziza Chaouni
Architect, activist and professor Aziza Chaouni – the first Moroccan national to study architecture at Harvard University – addresses climate resilience, ecological sustainability, and social empowerment through design.
Chauni’s most prominent project has been creating earthquake-resistant buildings in Morocco, following a devastating earthquake in 2023 that claimed the lives of around 3,000 people.
Remote areas in the Atlas mountains, where buildings were made from unreinforced brick and masonry, were the worst affected by the 6.8-magnitude disaster. Chaouni’s designs are not only affordable, but are built with compressed bricks made of 95 per cent earth that are interlocked with mortar and vaulted brick roofs reinforced with steel rods, while wastewater is filtered to be reused.
The project exemplifies the need for climate-sensitive, socially responsible architecture, and for her work Chauni was awarded the 2024 IMA “Impact” Design Award in October.
5. Livia Giuggioli Firth
Livia Giuggioli Firth’s environmental contribution was almost entirely rooted in fashion, until she spent the lockdown on her twin brother’s organic farm in Umbria. Now she has moved to working on the sustainable and regenerative farm project known as Quintosapore (meaning fifth taste).
For decades, Firth committed to raising awareness on sustainability in the fashion industry. In 2010, she founded the Green Carpet Challenge, bringing sustainability to the forefront by encouraging celebrities and designers to choose eco-friendly materials and follow ethical practices on the red carpet, spotlighting the environmental costs of fast fashion.
Her 2015 documentary, The True Cost, highlighted the hidden environmental and ethical toll of fast fashion, largely on women in the Global South. Through her activism, she has influenced major fashion brands to adopt more sustainable practices and sparked a movement towards greater transparency and accountability in the industry. Last year, she closed her longstanding consultancy business, Eco-Age, after 17 years.
6. Natsai Audrey Chieza
Fashion has a pollution problem, but Zimbabwe-born Natsai Audrey Chieza found an unlikely solution in biology. Most of the textile industry’s ecological damage happens near the end of the process at the dyeing stage, as it requires a huge amount of water and many chemicals used are petroleum-based. Chieza came across a solution in the pigment found in mould, which she harnessed to create a toxin-free dye, creating a groundbreaking alternative technique.
It’s just one achievement out of her design, research and development studio Faber Futures. Set up in 2018, it designs at the intersection of nature, tech, science and sustainability, using biology to address problems caused by the climate crisis. Her work within the biodesign sector not only reduces the environmental impact of textile production but also promotes a broader dialogue about the role of biology in sustainable design.
Her success led her to co-found Normal Phenomena of Life (NPOL), a pioneering biodesign brand aiming to change the fashion industry’s over-reliance on petrochemicals. Instead it offers grown-to-order products such as bacterially dyed garments, algae-ink prints, and microbial bioconcrete. It’s part of working towards her future vision that all materials, whether for our clothes or construction, will be made from living organisms.
7. Stella McCartney
Even before sustainability became a buzzword, Stella McCartney’s name had long been associated with sustainable fashion as she used her status and following to speak out on environmental issues. Inspired by her mother Linda, an animal rights activist, McCartney has become one of the most influential figures in fashion, refusing to use any kind of animal products, and encouraging the reuse and recycling of materials, as well as the reduction of waste.
She launched her eponymous fashion line in 2001 and has been committed to ethical and environmentally conscious practices since. She has recently gone on to champion regenerative farming practices in her supply chain and has expanded the use of bio-based materials.
Earlier this year, she launched her most sustainable collection yet, made from 100 per cent cruelty-free materials, using materials such as fungi-based vegan leather and yarns from seaweed. She’s also partnered with materials company, Balena, to create a completely biodegradable shoe sole in a bid to reduce waste.
Business & Finance
8. Greg Jackson
Paving the way for modern energy companies in the UK is the founder and CEO of Octopus Energy, Greg Jackson. With a long-standing interest in the climate from a young age and a member of Greenpeace aged 16, he went on to create Octopus in 2016, which sources a large portion of its energy from renewables. Jackson has turned green tech into a formidable force and wants to make renewable energy smart, affordable, and undeniably consumer-friendly.
Octopus is currently the UK’s largest energy supplier, thanks to Jackson’s attitude of not being afraid to shake things up, mainly with its dynamic pricing. It is investing heavily in wind and solar, where most of its renewables also come from, and it uses a tech platform to incentivise customers to use energy when more renewables have been generated, or when it’s at its cheapest and cleanest. For his services to the energy industry, he was awarded an OBE last year.
9. Scott Strazik
Scott Strazik is the CEO and president of GE Vernova, one of the largest producers of electricity in the world. Since being named to run the power division of General Electric when it was spun off into a separate company in the spring of 2024, Strazik has presided over a more than fourfold gain in the company’s stock price.
GE is one of the biggest players in the renewable energy business, managing sizeable operations in wind, nuclear, hydropower, and electricity generation. It has become a favourite of investors who are looking to cash in on the booming business for AI and in particular powering data centres for technology giants.
Strazik is a career GE executive, having previously run both its gas power business and aviation commercial engine business. GE Vernova is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
10. Andrew Forrest
Andrew Forrest is one of Australia’s richest men, having founded the Fortescue Metals Group 20 years ago, and is now a philanthropist and green energy advocate using his billions to help mitigate climate change.
Forrest’s fortune is estimated by Forbes to be above $17bn (£12.8bn), much of which he has ploughed back into his privately held Squadron Energy venture, which he founded in 2022. The company paid around $2.6bn that year for Australia’s biggest wind energy company, CWP Renewables.
Among other philanthropic endeavours, he has pledged to help rebuild Ukraine into a clean energy giant once the war with Russia is over. Forrest is known for railing against oil executives and the markets-based system of measuring corporate performance by quarterly earnings or half-year earnings, which he said is too short a timespan to allow companies to invest in meaningful change.
11. Eva Zabey
Eva Zabey is the CEO of Business for Nature, a Geneva-based group of more than 100 organisations seeking to work with business and policymakers on behalf of the environment. The group refreshed its ambitious plans to achieve a nature-positive economy for all by 2030 earlier this year to focus, among other things, on national deep dives with local partners in places such as South America, Africa and Asia. Within this plan, she is calling for it to become mandatory for all companies to report on their impact on nature, part of the Target 15 initiative.
Before joining Business for Nature, Zabey was a senior member of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development for 15 years. As an ecologist, she has long been associated with work to reverse the loss of important natural systems, as well as biodiversity initiatives.
12. Jonathan Maxwell
The British investment banking entrepreneur Jonathan Maxwell created Sustainable Development Capital LLP almost 17 years ago to seek opportunities in the booming market for energy efficiency. Since then, it has been at the forefront of creating value from wasted heat and gas.
Maxwell notes that up to a third of global emissions are caused by the construction sector, from cement and steel to inefficient lighting and air conditioning systems. Whether it’s steel mills in the US to olive presses in Spain, the company works with large commercial operations to find ways for them to save energy by reducing waste.
In the past year, Maxwell has hit the television news circuit in the UK and US to alert viewers to the dangers of cuts to climate funding in both places and to promote his book, The Edge: How Competition for Resources is Pushing the World, and its Climate, to the Brink – and What we Can Do About it. Sustainable Development also did a major deal with equity firm General Atlantic to sell a minority stake to one of the investment giant’s climate funds.
13. Carole Bamford
As the founder of Daylesford and her eponymous brand, Bamford, Carole Bamford champions not only British farming, but sustainable food production and the benefits of organics. She has undeniably been a key driving force in making ethical and sustainable everyday living attractive to the general public. At Daylesford pubs and cottages, all run from 100 per cent renewables, reducing waste is essential, whether it’s turning spent coffee grounds into body scrubs, fermenting glugs of produce, or turning beeswax into beauty products.
Last November, she was a prominent voice in criticising the government’s controversial family farm tax, which she says will threaten farm sustainability.
This year, she has just hosted Daylesford’s inaugural event, Down To Earth: The Daylesford Nature Summit, which saw 150 leaders across food, farming, fashion and sustainability come together to discuss important topics such as land stewardship and organic innovation.
14. Scott Tew
Scott Tew knows better than anybody the opportunities – and risks – inherent in fighting climate change. Tew is managing director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Sustainability at Trane Technologies, one of the world’s largest industrial cooling and heating companies.
In a world in which record temperatures are being set every month, there is arguably no better position to be in than working at an air conditioning company. Tew is one of the environmental, social and governance (ESG) world’s most prominent corporate innovators, drawing large audiences when he discusses how companies need to develop sustainability cultures.
Trane is based in North Carolina but domiciled in Ireland, and its stock is among the best performers on Wall Street of any clean tech stocks of the last few years. It has continued its run so far in 2025, up more than 17 per cent through June. With 15 per cent of emissions coming from inefficient heating and cooling systems, and another 10 per cent from food transportation, Tew and Trane are in a strong position to influence how the world reacts to global warming, and how companies can prepare.
15. Stefania Di Bartolomeo
Stefania Di Bartolomeo is the founder of Physis Investment, a Boston-based asset manager with an all-woman executive team dedicated to making investing in the fight against climate change profitable and transparent.
A Harvard graduate who grew up in Italy, she became focused on sustainable finance in her early twenties after taking a call from an investor asking how her money, specifically, was making a difference.
Di Bartolomeo conceived a software portfolio package that would show investors not just how much money they were making or losing on a stock, but also how that company uses money on things like water security, energy efficiency, corporate philanthropy, or to increase the number of women in its senior management ranks.
Physis, a fintech company whose name is Greek for nature or law of nature, is dedicated to advocating the position that there are important metrics to investing in companies beyond just profit and loss. Over the last year, it became one of the first sustainable investing companies to incorporate AI into its algorithm for picking stocks in a transparent manner that would benefit the environment and be good investments.
16. Nick Mabey
As the founder of global think tank Leading E3G, (which stands for Third Generation Environmentalism), Nick Mabey has been the CEO since 2006 and has steered the company in climate policy and diplomacy to work towards transitioning to a greener future. He was also an early adopter of the idea that the climate crisis poses serious risks to national and global security, back in the 1990s.
As part of this, he launched the annual London Climate Action Week event in 2019, in partnership with the Mayor of London, which is now held every June. Since then, it’s gone on to become one of the world’s largest independent climate-focused events.
He has also authored and co-authored several books and reports, including Argument in the Greenhouse: The International Economics of Controlling Global Warming back in 1996. He was awarded an OBE in 2022, for his climate leadership and role in supporting the UK Cop26 in Glasgow, where he served as a “Friend of Cop26”, advising the UK COP presidency.
17. Yvon Chouinard
Yvon Chouinard is one of the most influential businessmen in the climate world. A rock climber, environmentalist and philanthropist, he became a billionaire after founding Patagonia, the California-based maker of outdoor recreation clothing, in 1973.
In 2022, Chouinard stunned both the environmental and corporate worlds by donating all of Patagonia’s investing stock (while keeping control of its voting stock) to a trust to ensure that future profits are used to address the climate crisis. Since then, the trust has directed more than $71m (£56m) to environmental causes, including a campaign in the last year to encourage its outdoor enthusiast customers to vote for climate candidates in local and national elections.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Chouinard was a well-known mountain and ice climber in Europe and the US, and started out making steel pitons (spikes) for climbing. In the 1970s, when he learned that the steel pitons were cracking the rock faces in Yosemite National Park, he changed the material to aluminium and, in the process, invented what is now called “clean climbing”.
18. Michael Bloomberg
Billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York and founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies, has a two-pronged approach to fighting the climate crisis – policy advocacy and financial innovation.
During his 11 years as mayor, he reduced the city’s carbon footprint by 13 per cent. Since leaving politics, he has continued to call for the phasing-out of coal power and through Bloomberg Philanthropies, created a $500m (£372m) fund dedicated to closing coal plants and transitioning to cleaner energy sources.
In January, Bloomberg said his philanthropies arm would step in to cover US funding for the United Nations’ climate budget after President Trump said he would end the country’s international climate funding and withdraw from the terms of the Paris Agreement.
19. Kathryn Murdoch
Kathryn Murdoch isn’t just funding climate action, she’s also playing a part in reshaping it and is able to push for systemic environmental change. As co-founder of the Quadrivium Foundation, along with her husband James Murdoch – son of media mogul Rupert – she backs science-backed initiatives that drive climate action, strengthen democracy, and promote ocean health. A former strategist at the Clinton Climate Initiative, Murdoch has spent over a decade pushing for better climate solutions.
She sits on the boards of the Environmental Defense Fund, Climate Central, and the Climate Leadership Council, informing high-level climate strategy. In 2023, she co-launched Futurific Studios to tell hopeful, solutions-focused stories about the planet’s future, including the PBS docuseries A Brief History of the Future, showing what a better world could actually look like.
NGOs, Non-Profits & Philanthropists
20. Jennifer Morgan
Jennifer Morgan has been a central figure in international climate policy for over two decades, contributing to the climate crisis response through activism, diplomacy, and leadership in global climate negotiations.
She became Germany’s special envoy for international climate action in 2022, the first person to hold the role, and now steers Germany’s climate policy on the world stage, where she’s working towards a faster shift to renewable energy sources.
She’s incredibly experienced in the sector and has held previous roles at some of the industry’s biggest hitters, including working at the Climate Action Network in the Nineties, leading the WWF’s Global Climate Change Program and then taking on the role of global climate change director for the think tank E3G.
She is also the former CEO of Greenpeace International. Recently, after protests at Cop29 in Baku, she spoke out about how she thinks the events are essential, as every country in the world has a seat at the table.
21. Bill Gates
Though best known for founding Microsoft and his philanthropy through the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates is pouring a significant amount of his time and wealth into tackling the climate crisis. He founded the investment firm Breakthrough Energy in 2015, which backs tech companies focused on climate solutions.
His approach to net zero is grounded in his tech world background. In an interview with Fortune he said “planting trees will not solve the climate problem” and added that “doing climate policy by brute force will not work either”.
He believes the answer is to “invest in new technologies for carbon removal, clean energy, and electric vehicles and to implement policies like carbon taxes that could fund future green technologies”. Over the past few months, Gates has tailored his climate efforts less toward investing, given the headwinds against climate action from the Trump administration, and more towards encouraging climate entrepreneurship to lay the seeds for future innovation.
In his 2021 book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, he outlined a comprehensive plan for reaching net zero emissions, emphasising the importance of global cooperation and innovation.
22. Rita Maria El Zaghloul
With just 17 per cent of the world’s land and a mere 8 per cent of its oceans under formal protection, the planet remains acutely vulnerable to biodiversity loss and ecological collapse. Rita Maria El Zaghloul is working towards changing that.
As the 2024 Earthshot prize winner in the Revive Our Oceans category, El Zaghloul is at the forefront of a global push to protect at least 30 per cent of the world’s land and oceans by 2030. She leads the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, an alliance focused on preserving carbon sinks, boosting ecosystem resilience, and halting destructive practices like illegal overfishing and the extraction of resources.
Under her, it has already secured support from over 120 countries, and now she’s pushing for accountability, ensuring commitments are turned into tangible action. Progress is visible though, as nearly 50 member states have begun strengthening conservation laws, like Chile’s expansion of marine protected areas to around 1.5 million square kilometres.
El Zaghloul’s work is essential for creating a coordinated defence of the planet’s remaining wild spaces, before they’re gone.
23. Alice Ruhweza
Alice Ruhweza is one of Africa’s most respected voices in sustainable development, with nearly three decades of experience working at the intersection of climate, agriculture, and economic policy. In March, she took on one of the most influential roles in African agriculture as president of AGRA (the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa), an organisation that drives climate-resilient and inclusive farming systems.
Her appointment comes at a critical time, as Africa faces the converging crises of climate shocks, food insecurity, and biodiversity loss. She previously led WWF Africa’s regional work on regenerative agrifood systems and spearheaded data-driven environmental policy as co-director of the Vital Signs Program at Conservation International.
At UNDP, she mobilised an estimated $1bn (£743m) for green projects in more than 40 African countries. Now at AGRA, Ruhweza’s focus is to champion homegrown solutions, empower smallholder farmers, and ensure Africa’s agricultural transformation is both just and ecologically sound.
24. Mithika Mwenda
Mithika Mwenda is the co-founder and executive director of the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), a collection of more than 70 non-governmental organisations that have come together to address problems around the climate crisis.
Mwenda has worked in the climate sector for a decade and has a strong influence over climate policy. He advocates for sustainable solutions that are specifically tailored to the needs of African countries rather than those of the Western world, while also ensuring Africa’s development.
At Cop29 last year in Baku, Azerbaijan, Mwenda delivered a powerful appeal, rejecting the burden of loans on African nations and advocating instead for grant-based, equitable climate finance. He stressed the importance of justice for accessible, affordable funding for the communities who are most vulnerable to climate risk.
In 2023, the PACJA criticised the decision to appoint oil executive Sultan al-Jaber to lead Cop28, a move it called the “lowest moment” for the UN. In May last year, the PACJA hosted the UN Civil Society Conference in Kenya – the first time the event has been held there – as a precursor to the Summit of the Future at the UN in New York this month.
25. Ann Lee
Following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, which reached a magnitude of 7 and tragically killed more than 220,000, Ann Lee co-founded a crisis relief organisation, Community Organized Relief Effort (Core), along with actor Sean Penn.
Lee has been the CEO since 2015, and has led the relief efforts across the world including, the Ukraine invasion, the Sudan War, Covid-19 Pandemic, Pakistan floods and Hurricane Helene.
She works on preparedness efforts with communities around the world to help them bolster against climate-driven disasters, such as watershed management, agroforestry, biodiversity protection, and soil conservation, where Lee and Penn often highlight the role human impact plays a part in the increasing disasters.
They work in disaster-prone regions like North Carolina which suffers from hurricanes and Northern California that’s prone to wildfires, working alongside local communities to strengthen infrastructure and reduce vulnerability to extreme weather exacerbated by climate change. Earlier this year, Core focused its emergency response efforts on the Los Angeles wildfire.
26. Boyan Slat
Boyan Slat is a Dutch inventor and entrepreneur who founded The Ocean Cleanup in 2013 when he was just 18 years old, after he went scuba diving off the coast of Greece and noticed more plastic in the ocean than fish.
The project centers around a giant plastic tube with a thick nylon screen that can trap plastic as small as a millimeter in size but won’t ensnare any sea creatures.
Slat, now aged 31, recently announced a project that plans to stop some of the plastics entering the ocean in the first place. He will deploy the technology to the rivers of around 30 cities to catch plastic as it makes its way out toward the oceans.
The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit based in the Netherlands, announced this past spring that it has captured more than 11.5 million tonnes of plastic this year, more than all the previous years combined.
27. Mafalda Duarte
Mafalda Duarte is executive director of the Green Climate Fund, which claims to be the largest multilateral climate fund in the world, with a portfolio of $18bn (£13.3) in approved funding for projects.
Born in Portugal, Duarte has spent her career working in more than 30 developing countries on climate projects. She also managed the Climate Investment Funds, a pool of more than $8bn being put to work in more than 70 developing countries. Before that, she worked at the African Development Bank and World Bank.
She recently spoke about the potential for Brazil to play a major role in developing climate finance and is expected to be a key player at the United Nations climate summit, Cop30, in Belem, Brazil in November.
28. Inger Andersen
Inger Andersen is a Danish economist who leads the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep). Her recent achievements include leading global negotiations on plastic pollution, which have been moving ever closer towards an international, legally binding deal to tackle a burgeoning global problem, both for the environment and public health. However, negotiations have failed in the past few months to finalise a treaty. Europe wants to reduce the creation of plastic, while oil states such as Russia want to increase recycling programmes instead.
“To stop plastic pollution, we need to start at the start and end at the end,” she said at an event last year. “This means crafting an instrument that ensures we use fewer virgin materials and less problematic plastic. That we design for circularity. That we use, reuse and recycle resources more efficiently. This is the instrument we need to protect human and ecosystem health – while ensuring a just transition and space for the private sector to thrive in a new sustainable economy.”
Though there have been deadlocks, there’s hope to regroup to review the treaty.
29. Juan Carlos Jintiach
Ecuadorian-born Juan Carlos Jintiach has dedicated his life to ensuring indigenous communities’ voices are heard on the frontlines of the climate movement. He is a member of the Shuar People of the Ecuadorian Amazon, and is calling for world leaders to listen to them, emphasising that the crisis stems from a broken relationship with nature and says indigenous people’s knowledge is integral to the solutions.
As executive secretary of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities (GATC), he represents 35 million people managing vast swathes of forests across 24 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. He believes Indigenous communities are the best stewards of their territories, having lived in harmony with nature for generations.
The GATC have established Shandia, which is a platform that is dedicated to supporting and directing Indigenous funds, and ensuring accurate tracking of them. He is also a technical adviser for the Coordinator of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), a major Amazonian Indigenous federation. For his work, in 2023 he was shortlisted for the Nobel Peace Prize.
30. Dame Lisbet Rausing
As heiress to Sweden’s Tetra-Pak business, a science historian, co-founder of philanthropic foundations Arcadia and the Lund Trust, and a landowner in Scotland, Dame Lisbet Rausing has many strings to her bow. Collectively, they all play a part in her environmental work.
Dame Lisbet owns the 57,000-acre Corrour Estate in the Scottish Highlands, and since 2015 has worked on environmental projects including deer management, planting native woodlands, restoring peat bogs and reintroducing red squirrels.
The Arcadia Fund, which Dame Lisbet co-founded, has donated more than $1.3bm (£996m) to environmental causes and this year received a damehood for her philanthropic work.
Last year, Corrour Estate joined Loch Abar Mòr, a nature preservation partnership that already included the National Trust for Scotland, Glenaladale Estate, The Woodland Trust, Glen Nevis Estate and the Nevis Landscape Partnership. Together, they will restore a large part of the Lochaber area in the Highlands to make it more ecologically diverse and so more resilient to the effects of the climate crisis over the next 50 years.
31. MacKenzie Scott
An author and philanthropist, MacKenzie Scott is still perhaps best-known for who she used to be married to – Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. But since 2019, she has emerged as a major force in environmental giving.
She has given $19.2bn (£14bn) via more than 400 grants in the past five years, including almost 200 grants worth $2bn last December alone.
Scott has donated $15m to Global Fishing Watch, an independent nonprofit that creates and shares data on the ocean to increase the transparency of fisheries and help improve marine resilience. She has also donated $20m to Blue Ventures, which supports coastal communities and small-scale fishing operations.
Scott’s approach to funding is unique: her grants are “unrestricted”, which gives organisations more autonomy and helps empower grassroots groups living and working on the frontline of environmental issues.
32. Rena Lee
As Singapore’s Ambassador for Oceans and Law, Rena Lee advocates for the vital but often overlooked relationship between ocean health and climate. Her work shows ocean governance is essential to climate resilience to protect the planet’s largest, yet most neglected, climate regulator, the ocean.
Lee played a pivotal role in the landmark United Nations High Seas Treaty in 2023, the first-ever international agreement to protect biodiversity in international waters, covering nearly two-thirds of the world’s oceans. This treaty represents a major breakthrough, enabling the creation of protected marine areas beyond national jurisdictions and offering a lifeline to the ocean’s ability to regulate the climate. For her work on this, she was recognised as one of Time’s 100 most influential people.
In late 2024, she spoke at the International Court of Justice, urging world leaders to take their legal duties on climate change seriously.
33. Helen Clarkson
After tackling humanitarian crises while working for Médecins Sans Frontières in countries including Sudan and Pakistan, Helen Clarkson moved her career focus to the planet’s wellbeing.
Now she’s the CEO of the Climate Group, a non-profit driving businesses towards net-zero emissions, which also runs the annual Climate Week event, held every September in New York. Clarkson is responsible for taking Climate Week from its humble beginnings in 2009 as a panel discussion to the globally important, myriad of events it is now. She advocates for systemic change, pushing for ambitious climate policies and fostering collaboration between businesses and governments.
Clarkson emphasised that energy affordability and climate action must be addressed together. In 2022, she was awarded an OBE for services to environmentalism and supporting the UK’s presidency of Cop26.
Food & Agriculture
34. Doug McMaster
Claiming to be the world’s first zero waste restaurant is a lofty claim, but it’s one that owner and chef Doug McMaster can attain to as there aren’t bins in his restaurant.
Silo first opened in Brighton in 2014, and later moved to east London’s Hackney Wick. Everything in the restaurant is reused or recycled. Beyond the food, the furniture is upcycled or recycled and tables are made from recycled plastics too.
His most recent project is using koji, a traditional Japanese mould, to ferment hard-to-reuse food scraps giving them new life to produce misos and fermented sauces like shoyus and garums, which can be used as flavour enhancers for dishes in the restaurant.
McMaster’s work is not just about food, it’s about creating a scalable solution to hospitality’s food waste and he’s a pioneer in how waste can be drastically limited and reused within the industry.
35. Chantelle Nicholson
One of just 36 UK chefs awarded a Green Michelin Star, Chantelle Nicholson is a leader in regenerative practices in the food world. At her Mayfair restaurant Apricity, her regenerative ethos runs through everything, as Nicholson believes in going beyond simply “sustaining” to actively regenerating.
She’s a powerhouse for championing seasonal and local produce, innovatively minimising food waste and excess packaging, and avoiding unnecessary energy use, down to details like using rechargeable candles instead of single use and switching off unused fridges, preventing energy waste, which is rife in busy working kitchens.
This year Nicholson is expanding her vision and branching out from London with a new project, Fjora a restaurant in the 1 Hotel in Copenhagen. It follows her regenerative ethos with a Nordic-inspired menu that’s deeply rooted in her connection to nature.
36. Caroline Bennett
After struggling to source sustainable and ethically caught fish for her sushi restaurant, Moshi Moshi in London’s Liverpool Street station, Caroline Bennett took a leap of faith, and did it herself.
Setting up Sole of Discretion in 2016, an ethical online fishmonger, she connected the dots between fishers in Plymouth harbour with not only her London restaurant, but also people at home who could buy quality British fish, knowing exactly where it came from. Supporting small-scale, low-impact fisheries, she works with small day boats that don’t have the same damaging impact on the ocean as industrial boats do. Each fish is traceable, labelled with information on where it was caught, the method, the name of the skipper and the boat, as for too long, all of this information was lost at port.
This year, she’s working with Scottish charity, Open Seas, on its #DivedNotDredged Campaign, which is amplifying the intense desolation dredgers cause to the ocean bed, which can take up to 10 years to recover after just one dredge. Instead it champions the far less impactful hand-dived scallops. It also reflects the important message of Sir David Attenborough’s seismic documentary Ocean, which focuses on this very issue.
37. Andy Cato
Andy Cato, former electronic musician and half of Groove Armada, made an unexpected shift from music to farming almost two decades ago. After selling his music rights, he bought a farm in France and became deeply invested in soil health, biodiversity, and access to better food systems. This led him to become a voice for regenerative agriculture, where he advocates for the importance of farming regeneratively, looking after soil and water health, and food security.
Cato brought this message to a mainstream audience through a guest appearance on Clarkson’s Farm, where he successfully encouraged Jeremy Clarkson to trial regenerative practices, which he’s continued.
In 2018, Cato co-founded Wildfarmed with former broadcaster George Lamb and finance expert Edd Lees. The company now works with over 150 farms across the UK and France, all adhering to a set of agreed regenerative methods Wildfarmed laid out, including maintaining crop cover, integrating livestock, and avoiding synthetic pesticides.
Wildfarmed produces flour and bread for both wholesale and consumers, aiming to make regenerative food systems affordable and accessible to all, and so is available in supermarkets. Their work blends innovation, ecological responsibility, and social equity in the quest for a healthier food future.
38. Dr Mariangela Hungria
Dr Mariangela Hungria, a Brazilian agronomist and microbiologist, was named the 2025 World Food Prize Laureate, an honour often referred to as the Nobel Prize for Agriculture. The award recognises her four decades of pioneering research into biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) as a sustainable alternative to synthetic nitrogen fertilisers.
Working with Brazil’s Embrapa (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation), Dr Hungria has developed innovative microbial inoculants that enable crops, particularly soybeans, beans, and other legumes, to naturally absorb nitrogen from the atmosphere. Her work has transformed tropical agriculture, improving soil health, reducing input costs, and minimising environmental damage.
Today, her BNF methods are applied to more than 40 million hectares of Brazilian farmland, saving farmers up to $40bn (£30bn) annually and avoiding more than 180 million metric tons of CO2 emissions each year. Her research also supports global climate goals by reducing dependence on fossil fuel-derived fertilisers and increasing long-term agricultural resilience.
39. Vandana Shiva
A former physicist, Dr Vandana Shiva became an activist in the 1970s and has gone on to focus her work on protecting seeds and food sovereignty, which she’s regarded as the leading voice on. She famously campaigned against laws that would prevent farmers saving, sharing, or replanting seeds, which would give big corporations ownership of seeds and destroy traditional farming. To protect them, she set up more than 150 seed banks in India.
In her work, she also advocates for ecology, environmentalism and eco-feminism – a branch of the movement that combines feminism with political ecology. A key part of that is the “invisible” work women do that goes unnoticed, but is key to protecting the environment, such as water collection.
She believes an intersectional approach is key to climate adaptation and justice, which she sees as a biodiverse women and community-led approach to agriculture, especially in more climate-vulnerable regions. To promote this, she set up her own NGO, Navdanya.
40. Nidhi Pant
Combating food waste, rural poverty and gender inequality – three of the Indian farming community’s biggest issues – is S4S Technologies, which was co-founded in 2013 by Nidhi Pant and six university friends.
It creates pioneering solar-powered dehydrators, which are used to prevent food waste. By drying food out without using electricity, it enables rural smallholder farmers to financially benefit from being able to sell their entire crop. Previously around 30 per cent could be lost due to bad weather, being misshapen or market price fluctuations. It’s a life-changing move for rural farmers living in poverty.
Since it began, S4S Technologies has helped provide sustainable incomes for around 300,000 rural farming women across 400 villages, vastly improving gender inequality in the process. Pant was awarded the Earthshot Prize in 2023 by Prince William. The team has prevented 60,000 tonnes of food waste and averted 300,000 tonnes of C02 emissions.
41. Sean Sherman
Chef Sean Sherman, a member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe, wanted to preserve his own heritage, so he founded The Sioux Chef, which promotes food sovereignty and educates others on Indigenous cultures and the importance of their environmental stewardship.
His ethos is to source local, wild and heirloom ingredients and follow the sustainable practices that Indigenous communities have used for generations.
This November, he’ll be publishing his latest cookbook, Turtle Island, which is the Indigenous name for North America. He’s also working on a new hub for indigenous food culture, Wóyute Thipi (meaning ‘food building’ in the Dakota language), which is set to open in Minneapolis later this year.
In 2021 Sherman and restaurateur Dana Thompson founded the restaurant Owamni (which translates to the place of falling, swirling water) in Minneapolis. The following year, it won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant. It’s mostly staffed by Indigenous people and serves Indigenous dishes without ingredients introduced by Europeans, such as butter and sugar. Since 2023, it has been run as a non-profit. For his work, Sherman won the prestigious Julia Child Award in 2023.
42. Pua Lay Peng
Nicknamed the Erin Brockovich of Malaysia, former chemist Pua Lay Peng became an activist after realising her community in Jenjarom, in the state of Selangor, was suffering from the devastating effects of the increased amount of plastic being illegally dumped there.
The crisis escalated after China banned plastic waste imports in 2018. Illegal plastic recycling factories opened, emitted toxic fumes with an acrid smell in the air, polluted waterways, and left residents suffering from respiratory issues and fatigue.
To combat it, she co-founded the Kuala Langat Environmental group (Persatuan Tindakan Alam Sekitar Kuala). Peng has rallied everyone in the community to push for action from local authorities, and has even faced death threats for it.
She’s been successful in shutting down more than 300 illegal recycling factories by visiting sites, filming it and posting it to YouTube, but more are beginning to reappear again. They’ve improved both the air and water quality and empowered communities to succeed in regional action, not only in her community but across the country too.
43. Ayisha Siddiqa
At just 26 years old, Ayisha Siddiqa has achieved a lot as a climate justice and human rights advocate. She campaigns for Indigenous people’s rights and the rights of women, who she recognises are disproportionately affected by floods and other devastation caused by the climate crisis.
Born in Pakistan, she moved to Brooklyn as a child, and believes solutions to the crisis are too often developed from a global North perspective, which doesn’t work for many of the countries worst affected.
At just 14, she saw the effects of climate change not only on the environment, but also on humans, after family members in Pakistan became ill from polluted river water. This led her to get involved in climate activism, and she went on to found her university’s branch of Extinction Rebellion in 2019 and lead a strike involving 300,000 people. In 2020 she co-founded Polluters Out, a global youth movement, and helped create an activist training course, the Fossil Free University.
She is also a climate advisor to the UN secretary general and UN youth envoy. This year she’s studying law at UCLA in Los Angeles, where she’s gearing up to tackle the climate crisis not just in the streets, but in the courtroom, to push for systemic change.
44. Bill McKibben
Author, environmentalist and activist Bill McKibben has been a key climate protest organiser for decades and has made many contributions to the fight, including being awarded the Gandhi Peace Award in 2013. In 1989, he wrote The End of Nature, which is widely recognised as the first book for a general audience about climate change and is still in print in 24 languages.
This year, his key driving message is that solar energy is the path to a greener future, and is pushing for the clean energy source to be more widely adopted. He has organised the inaugural Sun Day, a national day calling for action, on 21 September, chosen as it’s one of two solar equinox days. It’s also the subject of his new book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, published this month.
He co-founded the global grassroots organisation 350.org in 2008, which aims to end our reliance on fossil fuels. The name is an ode to climate scientist James Hansen, who warned that any atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide above 350 parts per million (ppm) was unsafe. Currently, the planet’s concentration is over 420ppm. In 2021, he founded Third Act, an activist group for older environmentalists, with the support of big names including Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and Jane Fonda.
45. Greta Thunberg
Aged just 22, Greta Thunberg has dedicated her life to the climate crisis and already achieved what other activists have struggled to do by bringing the severity and urgency of the climate crisis into homes across the world. So impactful has she been, it’s been dubbed the “Greta effect”.
To reduce her carbon footprint, she became vegan and refused to travel by aeroplane, aged just eight. In 2018, Thunberg inspired a global movement after holding her first school climate strike outside the Swedish parliament, which called for the end of reliance on fossil fuels. She was just 15 and inspired thousands of students around the world to join her Fridays for Future strikes.
Since then, she’s consistently called out world leaders in her sharp speeches for their inaction on climate change, including last November when she protested Cop29 being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, saying the authoritarian petrostate was given a chance to greenwash its human rights abuses.
Thunberg was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize every year between 2019 and 2023. In 2019, she became the youngest person to be named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. In 2022, she published The Climate Book, a “book of the year” for many top publications. She has also inspired others with Asperger’s (which she calls her superpower) to feel included and take a stand.
Since finishing her schooling in 2023, Thunberg ramped up her activism, including in the past year in support of Gaza. Last year, she was acquitted of charges of blocking an oil conference. After the verdict, she said: “We must remember who the real enemy is.”
46. Nemonte Nenquimo
She is the first woman president of the Waorani people of Pastaza and co-founder of the Indigenous-led, non-profit organisation, Ceibo Alliance, which is the first of its kind between four ancestral nations within Ecuador, Peru and Colombia.
She won a case against the Ecuadorian government in 2019, protecting half a million acres of Waorani ancestral land in the Amazon rainforest from oil drilling. It set a landmark legal precedent to protect a further seven million acres from planned oil auctions. But now, it’s under threat once again.
She told The Independent last year: “I’ve often thought that it must be easy to destroy what you don’t understand,” which is why she co-wrote her debut book last year, We Will Not Be Saved, with her husband Mitch Anderson. The memoir is one of hope and resistance and was well reviewed by critics.
She was the first Indigenous woman to be included on the Time 100 list, and she was one of six environmental leaders to be awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize. In 2020, the United Nations Environment Programme awarded her its Champions of the Earth award in the category Inspiration and Action.
47. Neeshad Shafi
Qatar regularly experiences some of the world’s highest temperatures, which regularly hit 44C, but can reach as high as an unbearable 50C.
As co-founder of the Arab Youth Climate Movement Qatar (AYCM), Neeshad Shafi has created a first-of-its-kind study on public perceptions of climate change in his home country, as he says “global warming” is over and the period of “global boiling” has begun.
Through his work, Shafi attempts to change the minds of the proportion of people in Qatar who don’t believe in the climate crisis, by showing them how the effects will impact them. One of the biggest battles Shafi has faced is some people’s belief that they can’t do anything to help change the situation, and countering that view is a major focus for him. In June this year, he was involved in the Doha Climate Talks, which focused on demanding action to address the crisis.
48. Julia Olson
Julia Olson is the founder and executive director of Our Children’s Trust, a not-for-profit law firm which empowers young people to hold governments accountable for their climate inaction.
It has won several landmark cases against state and local governments over the right to a healthy environment, including high-profile cases suing the US government for prioritising fossil fuels over ensuring a safe climate for future generations. Cases have been won across Montana, Colombia, Germany, and South Korea.
Last year, the US Supreme Court rejected a petition to review a constitutional climate lawsuit against the US government after a lower court rejected it. Attorneys in the case of Juliana vs United States vowed to fight on in other legal avenues.
Olson, an attorney, founded the trust in 2010 while pregnant with her second child and after watching Al Gore’s climate documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, where it dawned on her that future generations could be left with a near-devastated world without drastic action.
49. Wawa Gatheru
Kenyan-American climate activist Wawa Gatheru is the founder of Black Girl Environmentalist, which supports women of colour and gender expansive people. Its aim is to create a representative and inclusive climate movement, and to champion Black women as the leaders they already are. It is now one of the biggest Black youth-led climate organisations in the US, making her a powerful voice for underrepresented communities.
Last year, she spoke at The Independent’s inaugural Climate 100 event and told the audience, “There’s no such thing as a perfect environmentalist,” hitting back at the idea that people who care about the climate crisis must be perfectionists.
She was aware of the climate crisis while growing up, but came to the realisation that those most affected by it – people of colour – were generally not the same people making the decisions. She saw that the narrative for people of colour was more likely to be “victim” than “problem solver”, and also recognised that women had even less of a voice. Instead, she works to ensure Black voices are also at the centre of the climate movement too.
50. Desmond Alugnoa
Climate activist and co-founder of the Green Africa Youth Organization (GAYO), a Ghana-based NGO, is Desmond Alugnoa, who is tackling waste, air pollution, and environmental injustice. In 2024, GAYO won the Earthshot Prize in the “clean our air” category for its Zero Waste Model, an innovative community-based system that reduces landfill use, stops open waste burning, and creates dignified green jobs for waste workers.
The organisation’s work not only improves public health and air quality but also helps build local, circular economies and climate-resilient communities.
The Earthshot recognition came with £1m in funding to scale the project, and Alugnoa is aiming to reduce air pollution by up to 70 per cent and divert thousands of tonnes of waste by 2030.
51. Raoni Metuktire
Spending his lifetime protecting the Amazon, the chief of Brazil’s Kayapo tribe, Raoni Metuktire is now 93 years old, and hasn’t slowed down yet. One of Brazil’s most influential people, he’s often referred to as the most effective protector of the Amazon, yet growing up following a nomadic lifestyle in the Amazon, he didn’t encounter the outside world until age 22.
Even a decade ago, as reported by The Independent, Metuktire said the developed world was intent on “destroying everything” and urged its citizens to fundamentally change the way they think. At last year’s New York Climate Week, he called on global leaders to reflect on their responsibilities to help end extractive and illegal mining and logging, which are making way for increasing droughts and wildfires.
He became famous after campaigning with pop star Sting (also in this list) and his wife Trudie Styler in the late 1980s, to prevent hydroelectric dams being built on the Xingu River, a major tributary of the Amazon.
His memoir, Memórias do Cacique (The Chief’s Memoirs) was published in July, where he claimed Brazil’s previous right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, wanted to exterminate the country’s Indigenous people. This year, he met with Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and warned him of the devastating effects of oil drilling. Here, Metuktire was also awarded the Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit, Brazil’s highest civilian honour, recognising his lifetime of defending the environment and Indigenous rights.
Entertainment, Royalty & Sport
52. Billie Eilish
Multi-award-winning singer-songwriter Billie Eilish is the epitome of a Gen Z’er using their platform (she has a whopping 125 million followers on Instagram alone) to spread their message.
As a vegan since the age of 12, she ensures that only vegan food is sold at her gigs, though this has been controversial lately for some fans. She also asks the venues to encourage fans to come with reusable water bottles and makes sure there are refill stations to avoid plastic waste.
She ran her own climate event, OVERHEATED, in both London and Berlin this year, and will be debuting in the US soon. It’s based on the 2022 documentary she released of the same name, and brings together activists, musicians and designers discussing the biggest issues surrounding the climate crisis and calling on people to take action.
At her concerts, she also has “Eco Villages”, which is described as a hub to raise awareness of the climate crisis, and inspires fans to connect with environmental groups, learn more about a plant-based diet and to understand the detrimental effects of fast fashion.
53. Don Cheadle
Actor and Goodwill United Nations Ambassador Don Cheadle has previously asked, “What is more important than food and clean air?” Such a simple sentence, which gets to the crux of what we’re fighting for, serves as a simple reminder of the key issues at stake.
He was one of the founders of the humanitarian Not On Our Watch Project in 2008, which has since merged with The Sentry organisation, involving other celebrities including George Clooney and Matt Damon. The organisation urges leaders to protect vulnerable, marginalised and displaced communities, such as those in Darfur in Sudan. For this work, he and Clooney were awarded the Summit Peace Award.
Cheadle also worked with actor Harrison Ford to create Years of Living Dangerously, a documentary TV series tackling climate issues.
He’s a member of the board of directors for the Solutions Project (co-founded by actor Mark Ruffalo, also in this list), which has supported more than 300 community organisations fighting for climate justice in 45 states, and highlights racial and gender inequities.
Last September, as part of the Our Kids’ Climate initiative, Cheadle combined his parental role with his climate action work, urging the importance of protecting the planet for future generations. He signed an open letter along with more than 150 other parents including actors Emma Thompson and Julianne Moore.
54. Jessie Diggins
As a board member of POW, (Protect Our Winters), one of the world’s largest climate advocacy groups, American cross-country skier Jessie Diggins vocalises how increasingly warming winters are changing not only winter sports, but also the lives of the communities who live on and around the snow and have a reliance on it.
As a two-time cross-country World Cup champion who has been competing for 15 years, she says she’s seen winters change dramatically and speaks about the severity of winter environments disappearing before our eyes. In an interview last November, she said: “I will not shut up and ski,” highlighting the importance of the voices of people who see climate issues first hand too.
Ahead of the Nordic World Championships in Trondheim in February, Diggins and her teammates debuted race suits featuring images of melting glaciers, an impactful visual no one could ignore. She also endorsed the ban on PFAS chemicals in ski wax on the World Cup circuit, marking a major step toward reducing the environmental footprint of snow sports.
55. Jane Fonda
Activism has long been an important part of life for Jane Fonda. Many years since her days of anti-Vietnam war campaigning in the 1960s, the 87-year-old Oscar-winning actor now channels her energy into climate activism.
Earlier this year, Fonda became involved in the conservation of the Amazon rainforest, aligning with Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance, an Indigenous-led coalition representing multiple tribes (also featured in this list under Nemonte Nenquimo’s entry), to protect their ancestral lands. The aim is to convince Ecuador’s Constitutional Court to enshrine the rights of Indigenous people, which allows them to decide what happens in their home, and means they must be informed before any action is taken. It follows Ecuador’s president Daniel Noboa’s plans to auction off more than 8 million acres of Amazonian Indigenous lands to oil companies.
Fonda has been arrested five times for civil disobedience while marching and protesting in recent years. In 2019 alongside Greenpeace, she launched Fire Drill Fridays, a series of weekly protests in Washington DC to urge political leaders to take stronger action on climate change. These protests, inspired by Greta Thunberg, galvanised public support and then became educational virtual events that educated people about climate justice, sustainability, and environmental policy, until it ended last year.
She also founded the Jane Fonda Climate Political Action Committee in 2022, which raises money to defeat the fossil fuel industry’s influence on US politics and elect climate champions across government.
56. Lewis Pugh
British-South African former maritime lawyer Lewis Pugh is an endurance swimmer and prominent speaker on the effects of the climate crisis on our rivers and oceans. He completes long-distance swims in some of the planet’s most vulnerable and challenging waters – including the Arctic and Antarctic – to highlight the importance of marine conservation.
In May, he took on a 62-mile swim in 8C waters around Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Cape Cod. It’s known as the filming location for Jaws, which turned 50 this year, and was tied into his event’s aim to raise awareness for the critical need for shark conservation, and to change the public’s perception of them as vicious, cold-blooded killers. He was the first person ever to achieve this.
In 2023, he swam all 315 miles of the Hudson River and wrote an opinion piece about it for The Independent to highlight the importance of clean rivers. He also became the first person to swim the full length of the River Thames in 2006. The previous year, he swam 100 miles across the Red Sea to underline the impact of climate change on fragile coral reefs. He is a United Nations Patron of the Oceans, and part of the 30×30 campaign, which aims to protect 30 per cent of the world’s oceans by 2030. His work, and epic swims, are inspiring global efforts to safeguard marine ecosystems.
57. Mark Ruffalo
The anti-fracking movement’s most famous face, actor Mark Ruffalo has been an environmentalist for years, and uses the term “fractivists” to describe this particular branch of activism.
In 2016 he, Colin Firth and the late Vivienne Westwood wrote an open letter to then prime minister David Cameron to oppose fracking. In 2013, he co-founded The Solutions Project, an organisation committed to promoting 100 per cent renewable energy. In February 2024, Ruffalo worked with politicians to ban a new type of fracking, which swaps the use of water for pressurised carbon dioxide to get at methane trapped in shale. Fracking companies say this is a carbon-neutral fuel operation, but “fractivists” disagree.
Last October, he urged people to sign a petition to prevent the Irish Green Party from passing a “bill to fast track build
