Every year, The Goldman Environmental Prize honors grassroots activists from each of the six inhabited continental regions. In a historic first, every winner in 2026 was a woman. From running a successful anti-fracking movement in Colombia to holding the South Korean government responsible for climate inaction, these women are intelligent, inspiring and, literally, saving the planet.
I just got word that the early ’90s, extraordinarily influential cartoon Captain Planet is getting a live action remake. I’m not surprised by the news, every second film that hits our screens nowadays is a remake. Sometimes even a remake of a remake. It’s like a Hollywood Ouroboros and the snake is eating itself, except the snake is a Burbank film producer who only invests in a “safe bet”. Or a Marvel film.
Now, I’m pro the messaging behind Captain Planet and his team’s efforts to “bring pollution down to zero”, as per the theme song. But I do have a problem with the casting. Firstly, Henry Cavill is playing the Captain, which I think is a very lazy directorial move considering Henry Cavill is also Superman. Secondly, if the casting director chose to take any inspiration from our contemporary environmental super heroes, they would’ve discovered that these heroes are all, in fact, women.
The Goldman Environmental Prize, also known as the ‘Green Nobel Prize’, has been running for 37 years, and each year it celebrates six “grassroots leaders who prove that ordinary people can have an extraordinary impact on the environment”. This year, in an historic first, every prize winner is a woman. From saving Colombian rivers and holding Rio Tinto accountable for human rights abuses to spearheading a youth climate movement, these women have gone above and beyond for their communities and ecosystems.
So, an all-women Captain Planet cast? That’s what we deserve in 2026, because in 2026 it’s women who are doing the most. Keep reading to meet these super women role models, and find out what lessons we’re learning from them.
This activist and politician won a landmark case for remediation against Rio Tinto.
In its 17 years of operation, the Panguna Mine—on Bouganville island in Papua New Guinea—dumped more than one billion tons of tailings into the island’s waterways, decimated the natural ecosystem, caused generations of health issues for locals and resulted in a bloody civil conflict that killed an estimated 20,000 Bougainvilleans. Including Theonila Roka Matbob’s father.
The Panguna Mine, a Rio Tinto project, was permanently closed in 1989. But that doesn’t mean its impacts are not still felt today. “Rio Tinto destroyed everything. Food security, forest, mountains, trade as well. It was a termination of an ecosystem,” said Matbob.
“Our environment was tortured, and then the land was tortured, and the third party that was tortured, were my people,” she said in a video statement. “All the chemicals from the mine are in the river, it’s unbearable to start understanding the layers of pollution.”
“It’s just really a testament to the power of the people, we just never stopped until we were heard. At the end of the day, this was a fight for humanity. And for our ability to continue, as humans on this planet.”
- Alanna Acaq Hurley, activist
Matbob, 35, is an Indigenous Nasioi woman from the Basikang clan, who grew up close to the mine site. She is steadfastly committed to addressing the harms caused by the mine and holding the industry accountable. From co-founding an NGO education and trauma counseling center and working with the Human Rights Law Center (HRLC) to gather testimonies from villagers to becoming a member of the Bouganville House of Representatives, Matbob became a leading voice calling for remediation.
“We started to explore the option of a legal mediation process that would give us the room to have our voice, our views, our pain because it needed to be told,” she said. “My role was to communicate with the stakeholders responsible for destroying the ecosystem. I owe it to my ancestors.”
In 2020, Matbob became the lead complainant in a human rights complaint against Rio Tinto, the world’s second-largest mining company. In 2024, Rio Tinto signed a memorandum of understanding to address the environmental and social impacts of the dormant mine. They are embarking on a landmark collaborative remediation process.
“It doesn’t mean that we will restore everything as it was,” she said. “I am very very hopeful. There’s always light at the end of the tunnel, and I believe that we will get there, whether it’s in my lifetime or my great-grandchildren’s life.”
This Indigenous activist campaigned against North America’s largest open-pit mine, and saved an entire ecosystem in the process.
Bristol Bay, on the southwestern coast of Alaska, is home to a watershed that’s roughly the same size as Ohio, encompassing 25 million acres of forest, rivers, wetland and wildlife habitat—for everything from moose and grizzly bears to wolverines. And for Yup’ik leader, Alanna Acaq Hurley, 40, this land has been stewarded by her ancestors since time immemorial.
So when the Pebble Mine megaproject was proposed, Hurley was called upon to act on behalf of 15 tribal nations who opposed the open-pit mine. “This existential threat really brought everyone to the table,” she said in a video statement. “Commercial fisherman, the environmental community, business—that in itself is a feat, to bring together people who don’t usually get along.”
Bristol Bay also has the most productive salmon ecosystem in North America, with over 50 million fish spawning there annually. Beyond acting as a keystone species for the broader ecosystem, salmon are also incredibly important to the livelihoods, sustenance and culture of the local Indigenous communities. “It’s hard to imagine our ability to remain Indigenous people in this place without salmon,” said Hurley.
To mine this region for copper and gold—as was the motive for Canadian mining company Northern Dynasty Minerals—would mean disaster for Bristol Bay and surrounding watershed. “It was not a matter of if something goes wrong, it was a matter of when,” said Hurley. The environmental impacts would have included perpetual storage of 10 billion tons of mining waste and the annual removal of 35 billion gallons of freshwater from salmon spawning rivers.
After serious campaign, protesting and opposition from a diverse coalition, Hurley and her community achieved an historic EPA veto of the mining project in 2023. “It’s just really a testament to the power of the people, we just never stopped until we were heard,” said Hurley. “At the end of the day, this was a fight for humanity. And for our ability to continue, as humans on this planet.
And while this was a huge win, Hurley and the United Tribes of Bristol Bay continue to advocate for more permanent protections across the region.
This 31-year-old environmentalist reframed the climate crisis as a violation of human rights and safety, and won a historic case against the South Korean government.
In 2018 South Korea experienced a heat wave so intense that dozens of people died, including a woman who was around the age of Borim Kim’s mother. This event, alongside an increase in typhoons and flooding, spurred Kim, now 31, into action. “I realized that home wasn’t even safe from the climate crisis,” she said in a video statement. “So, I started looking for what I could do.”
From here, Youth 4 Climate Action (Y4CA) was born. She and Y4CA started organizing youth-led climate protests, school walkouts and letter-writing campaigns. These efforts helped propel South Korea’s climate stance into the national spotlight and mobilize thousands of civilians.
South Korea is the 13th largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world. It’s also heavily reliant on importing coal and natural gas from abroad. Despite being an innovator in other ways, South Korea’s renewable energy generation made up only 9 percent in 2023, as compared to a global average of 30 percent.
“When politicians and policymakers invited us to meet, we weren’t taken seriously,” said Kim. “We saw that the government’s climate response was inadequate, they had no long term plan.”
“My hope for the future is that people will take these small-scale projects as signals for what the future should look like. Let’s stay nimble, let’s try to work in our small communities and solve those problems there on the ground.”
- Iroro Tanshi, conservation ecologist
This was the beginning of their constitutional case. The argument: South Korea’s government climate policy was in violation of the constitutional rights of future generations. Y4CA reframed the climate crisis as a violation of human rights and safety.
It took over four and a half years of cases and campaigning, but in 2024 the South Korean Constitutional Court ruled in favor of Kim and her colleagues. “When I found out we won the case, I cried and so did my colleagues,” said Kim. “Fighting fossil fuels, fighting coal plants, the climate movement—all of this is connected.”
The court ruling established a new baseline for climate governance and mandated that all South Korean legislation be updated in line with international standards. The ruling is estimated to prevent between 1,600 and 2,100 million tons of CO₂ emissions.
“No single policy will change our situation,” said Kim. “Strong national systems and laws must be properly established. Youth may be seen as having a lower position in society, but now this decision has affirmed our right to live safely, and the state’s right to protect us.”
This conservation ecologist introduced a wildfire prevention scheme that is saving farms and endangered animals
In 2016, Iroro Tanshi, 41, re-discovered and captured an endangered short-tailed roundleaf bat in the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary. It was the first time this bat had been seen in Nigeria in 45 years.
Not only did she note this one individual bat, but she learned that this lush forested area is home to several short-tailed roundleaf bat colonies. A promising discovery considering the global population is thought to be less than 1,500.
“People don’t give bats as much credit as they deserve,” said Tanshi in a video statement. “They’re important because they plant seeds, they pollinate lots of flowers and so they provide us all these amazing ecosystem services.”
But only two weeks after making the discovery, a wildfire burned through the sanctuary. “So the thing about wildfires is that they originate on nearby farms, and it’s not intentional,” Tanshi explained. “The way people manage these farms is they use fire to clean the farms every year, but climate change has completely toppled the pattern of rainfall, and people can no longer predict when to burn safely. [The 2016 fire] burned through the lands until the rains came, there was no way to put out the fire. I’m talking 50 percent of the park was impacted.”
In response, Tanshi and her team launched the ‘Zero Wildfire Campaign’. They independently studied fire data and took lessons from the US Forest Service response. The team held meetings with village leaders, invested in wildfire early-detection systems and trained 50 community members as ‘Forest Guardians’. These locals have patrolled at least 2,400 farms since 2023 and have successfully responded to over 70 fire outbreaks. This program has not only safeguarded the biodiverse Afi Mountains region but it’s also protected the crops and livelihoods of roughly 27,000 people.
“My hope for the future is that people will take these small-scale projects as signals for what the future should look like,” said Tanshi. Let’s stay nimble, let’s try to work in our small communities and solve those problems there on the ground.”
This campaigner shut down oil and gas operations in the Weald in Surrey, and changed permissions for all future fossil fuel developments.
Did you know that the United Kingdom is Europe’s third largest producer of oil and gas? That’s right. Despite a national commitment to reducing carbon emissions by 2030 and a net-zero economy by 2050, the UK continues to invest in the fossil fuel industry.
Many of these drilling sites are hidden within rural landscapes, like the heavily forested Weald region of Surrey in southeastern England. This is where environmentalist Sarah Finch, 62, and the Weald Action Group (WAG) has been focusing their fight against extractive operators.
“When you have a chocolate cake, it is not the making of the cake but the eating of it that affects your waistline,” said Finch in a video statement. And when it comes to oil, “the burning of it is far more harmful to the climate than getting it out of the ground.”
“When there’s an oil spill, there’s no containment, no effective plan for mitigation. And every time there’s a spill, we lose simply everything.”
- Yuvelis Morales Blanco, activist
Sarah and WAG have led a determined campaign against one oil development, Horse Hill, for over a decade, which saw them push through more than five years of legal battles that escalated all the way to the Supreme Court.
In June 2024, the coalition achieved a court ruling, deemed the “Finch Ruling”, that shut down all operations. “It wasn’t just a win on Horse Hill, it wasn’t just a win on a handful of sites, it was a win against the whole future of the UK oil and gas industry,” said Finch. The Finch Ruling deems that authorities must take into account all downstream impacts that fossil fuels have on the global climate prior to granting any drilling permissions. It has already shifted the dial significantly on subsequent projects getting the greenlight.
“I feel like there are a lot of people doing really good things, and together we are going to make this world a better place than it otherwise would have been.”
This activist prevented fracking from being introduced to Colombia.
In 2018, oil from Ecopetrol’s Lizama Oil field spilled into the tributaries of Colombia’s Magdalena River killing animals, causing huge fish die-offs and forcing local families to relocate. Yuvelis Morales Blanco, 24, was in college at the time studying environmental engineering. This spill, close to her family home in Puerto Wilches, was her call to climate action.
Why? Because the Magdalena River is one of Colombia’s major lifelines. It’s exceptionally biodiverse—home to a multitude of habitats and ecosystems—and it’s important to local livelihoods. “That river is life. It’s what sustains me and my family, and our fishing community,” said Blanco in a video statement. “When there’s a spill, there’s no containment, no effective plan for mitigation. And every time there’s a spill, we lose simply everything.”
Blanco threw herself into campaigning against fracking along the Magdalena River, mobilizing a youth movement and speaking at rallies. In 2022, she faced physical threats against her life and had to seek asylum. France accepted her request and recognized her with the Marianne Initiative for Human Rights Defenders Award.
While abroad she continued the fight, and soon Ecopetrol was made to suspend its contracts for pilot fracking projects. Soon after the suspension, new Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that no fracking projects would take place during his term in office (2022-2026). In 2024, the Colombian Constitutional Court ruled that the fracking projects violated the right of the Puerto Wilches community to free, prior and informed consent.
“They didn’t consult us or tell us anything. Ecopetrol ignores the presence of Black and Afro-Colombian communities in this region,” said Blanco. As of today, no fracking projects have advanced in Puerto Wilches, but Blanco is working to make certain that it never happens—anywhere in Colombia.
“I am very hopeful, as I have a river that always accompanies me. And I know we’re going to win.”
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Tayla Gentle is managing editor of Adventure.com and an award-winning freelance writer, video producer and host. She specializes in storytelling that sits at the intersection of culture and responsible adventure.
