CEO, Business for Nature Eva Zabey was doing a master’s degree in environmental management in Lausanne, Switzerland, when a professor’s remark on her thesis sent her career on an unexpected trajectory. “I realized how pivotal businesses are to conserving and managing nature,” says Zabey, who now works to make business part of the solution to […]
Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, Brazil From a childhood in the Amazon to the halls of power, Marina Silva has fought for decades to protect the forest and those who call it home. Raised in a family of rubber tappers, Silva worked with the environmentalist Chico Mendes to battle deforestation in the Amazon […]
Actress and campaigner As a child, Dia Mirza found companionship in the pockets of nature tucked in her mother’s garden and around her school. She learned to value the biodiversity they nurtured – a lesson that stuck with her as she developed into a successful actor in India and began to use her platform to […]
Chair and founder, Liquidity and Sustainability Facility, and co-chair, Independent High Level Expert Group on Climate Finance Through her career at a series of international and financial organizations, Cameroonian economist and banking executive Vera Songwe has discovered a simple truth: it’s expensive to be a poor country. In particular, some African countries have found themselves […]
Indigenous Xipaya leader; director, the Association of Indigenous Students at UFPA “I am what I was taught to be, just like my ancestors were and what my children will be: defenders of the standing forest, ensuring our existence.” Meet Juma Xipaia, a Brazilian Indigenous activist belonging to the Xipaya people. A mother, wife, activist and […]
Senior scientist, Center for International Forestry Research–World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) Growing up as the oldest of seven children in Ethiopia’s beleaguered Tigray region, Aster Gebrekirstos could never have known that she would go on to study forestry, pioneer climate science and dendrochronology in Africa, author more than 100 scientific papers and train a generation of forestry […]
Co-founder, Salumayag Youth Collective for Forests (Philippines), and GLF 2023 Forest Restoration Steward In the fertile highlands of Bukidnon province, on the Philippine island of Mindanao, the Indigenous population used to be self-sufficient, relying on a system of collective farming to nourish their families and celebrate their cultural identity. Then came industrial logging and monocropping, […]
Indigenous Kichwa environmental and human rights activist Born into a family of female Indigenous advocates, Helena Gualinga grew up witnessing the conflict between her community and an oil company that had moved in without its consent. “I constantly saw all the things that happened to my people, to the people that said no,” she said […]
