{"id":39385,"date":"2026-04-23T10:11:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T08:11:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/?p=39385"},"modified":"2026-04-23T12:16:45","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T10:16:45","slug":"this-is-a-fight-for-humanity-meet-the-2026-winners-of-the-goldman-environmental-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/?p=39385","title":{"rendered":"\u2018This Is a Fight for Humanity\u2019: Meet the 2026 Winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

. . SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT . .<\/p>\n

An article by Olivia Rosane from Common Dreams <\/a> (reprinted according to \u00a0Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)<\/p>\n

The Goldman Environmental Foundation\u00a0announced\u00a0<\/a> the six winners of the\u00a02026 Goldman Environmental Prize\u00a0on Monday, honoring an all-female slate of advocates who protected\u00a0wildlife, took on extractive industries, and won important legal victories in the movement to halt the\u00a0climate crisis.<\/p>\n

\"\"Videos available on Goldman Prize website<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

The announcement comes as world leaders\u00a0have failed\u00a0<\/a> to make progress in addressing environmental challenges, and President\u00a0Donald Trump, leader of the world\u2019s largest historical climate polluter,\u00a0has withdrawn\u00a0<\/a> the US from the\u00a0Paris Agreement,\u00a0rolled back\u00a0<\/a> climate and environmental regulations domestically, and made efforts to\u00a0supercharge\u00a0<\/a> the extraction and use of\u00a0fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile we continue to fight uphill to protect the environment and implement lifesaving climate policies\u2014in the US and globally\u2014it is clear that true leaders can be found all around us,\u201d John Goldman, vice president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, said in a statement. \u201cThe 2026 prize winners are proof positive that courage, hard work, and hope go a long way toward creating meaningful progress.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 2026 prize is notable because it marks the first time that all of the winners\u2014Iroro Tanshi of\u00a0Nigeria, Borim Kim of\u00a0South Korea, Sarah Finch of the\u00a0United Kingdom, Theonila Roka Matbob of Papau New Guinea, Alannah Acaq Hurley of the US, and Yuvelis Morales Blanco of Colombia\u2014are women.<\/p>\n

\u2018There\u2019s lots of people doing really good things and, together, we are going to make the world a better place than it would otherwise have been.’<\/p>\n

\u201cI am especially thrilled to honor our first-ever cohort of six women, as this is a powerful reflection of the absolutely central role that women play in the environmental community globally,\u201d Goldman said.<\/p>\n

The winners also exemplify the prize\u2019s 2026 theme \u201cChange Starts Where You Stand,\u201d as each of them began with a fight to protect a local community or ecosystem that has global implications for the climate,\u00a0biodiversity, and\u00a0environmental justice.<\/p>\n

As US-based winner Alannah Acaq Hurley said, \u201cAt the end of the day, this is a fight for humanity, and, honestly, our ability to continue as humans on this planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here is how six remarkable women waged this fight and won.<\/p>\n

Iroro Tanshi<\/strong><\/p>\n

Iroro Tanshi is a Nigerian conservation ecologist who has worked successfully with local communities to protect endangered bats and their rainforest habitat from\u00a0wildfires.<\/p>\n

Tanshi was elated in 2016 when she discovered the short-tailed roundleaf bat, previously believed to be extinct in the area, living in Nigeria\u2019s Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary. However, two weeks later, a devastating wildfire ignited, forcing Tanshi to evacuate and ultimately impacting around half of the park.<\/p>\n

Tanshi then turned her attention to preventing wildfires, which are sparked by traditional farming practices rubbing against the climate crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way people manage these farms is they use fire to clean the farms every year, but\u00a0climate change\u00a0has completely toppled the pattern of rainfall and people can no longer predict when to burn safely,\u201d she explained in a video.<\/p>\n

Tanshi and her team worked with local communities on a Zero Wildfire Campaign, which includes educating farmers on when it is safe to burn and forming a team of \u201cforest guardians\u201d to patrol and fight fires on high-risk days. Due to her efforts, these guardians put out 74 fires between 2022 and 2025, preventing any of them from becoming major blazes.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy hope for the future is that people would take these small-scale projects as signals for what the future should look like,\u201d she said. \u201cLet\u2019s stay nimble. Let\u2019s try to work in our small communities and solve those problems there on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

Borim Kim<\/strong><\/p>\n

Borim Kim helped win Asia\u2019s first successful youth climate lawsuit, inspiring people across the region to demand government action on climate.<\/p>\n

Kim was first motivated to take collective action when a heatwave baked Seoul in 2018, killing 48 people including a woman near her mother\u2019s age, who died in her home.<\/p>\n

\u201cI realized that even home wasn\u2019t safe from the climate crisis,\u201d she said in a video. \u201cI started looking for what I could do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inspired by the international youth climate movement, she founded Youth 4 Climate Action (Y4CA) and helped organize school strikes and walkouts. After her\u00a0activism\u00a0led to meetings with policymakers, she realized that national leaders had no real plans to address the climate crisis. In 2020, she and Y4CA mobilized 19 young people to\u00a0sue\u00a0<\/a> the South Korean government for\u00a0violating\u00a0<\/a> the constitutional rights of future generations. Once the case was launched, she also continued to build a social movement for climate action.<\/p>\n

In August 2024, the country\u2019s Constitutional Court ruled in favor of the young people, mandating that South Korea reduce its emissions in line with the scientific consensus, a decision the environmental minister accepted. The ruling is projected to prevent between 1.6-2.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

\u201cYouth may be seen as having a lower position in society, but now this decision has affirmed our right to live safely and the state\u2019s duty to protect us,\u201d Kim said.<\/p>\n

Sara Finch<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the other side of the world, Sarah Finch also secured a precedent-setting legal climate victory.<\/p>\n

Finch lives in a part of southeastern England called the Weald. While it is currently a rural area, it hosts\u00a0oil\u00a0and gas reserves that were eyed for exploitation during the\u00a0fracking\u00a0boom of the 2010s. Finch helped form the Weald Action Group to push back against many potential wells, but they were not able to stop the Surrey County Council from approving the operation and expansion of a drilling site called Horse Hill in 2018.<\/p>\n

In gearing up to challenge the decision, Finch discovered that the council\u2019s environmental impact statement had only considered emissions from direct drilling at the site, but not the emissions generated from the burning of the fuel once it was extracted, also known as Scope 3 emissions, which make up around 90% of oil and gas\u2019 contribution to the\u00a0climate emergency.<\/p>\n

(article continued in right column)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Question for this article:<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n

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Local resistance actions: can they save sustainable development?<\/a><\/p>\n

(Article continued from the left column)<\/p>\n

\u201cIt became apparent that it was actually the norm that Scope 3 emissions were being emitted from these kinds of decisions, and we realized that actually it was happening everywhere and in much bigger developments than Horse Hill,\u201d Finch said in a video.<\/p>\n

She and her team challenged the environmental impact statement over its failure to consider Scope 3 emissions, losing multiple times before finally\u00a0securing\u00a0<\/a> a groundbreaking victory from the UK\u00a0Supreme Court\u00a0in 2024, which has come to be known as \u201cthe Finch ruling.\u201d<\/p>\n

The UK government cited the \u201cFinch ruling\u201d when it\u00a0revoked\u00a0<\/a> ts backing of two North Sea oil developments. Overall, the projects canceled or delayed in 2024 due to the ruling would have generated enough Scope 3 emissions to equal the UK\u2019s domestic\u00a0greenhouse gas emissions\u00a0that year.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t just a win on Horse Hill,\u201d Finch said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t even just a win on a handful of sites. It was a win on the whole future of the UK oil and gas industry. And I feel like, there\u2019s lots of people doing really good things and, together, we are going to make the world a better place than it would otherwise have been.\u201d<\/p>\n

Theonila Roka Matbob<\/strong><\/p>\n

Theonila Roka Matbob was born into an environmental disaster. Rio Tinto\u2019s Panguna Mine had devastated the ecosystem of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea\u2019s (PNG) Autonomous Region of Bougainville (ARB), destabilized its society, and led to a civil war that killed 15,000-20,000 Bougainvilleans, including her father.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur environment was tortured, and then the land was tortured, and the third party that was tortured were my people,\u201d Roka Matbob said in a video.<\/p>\n

Rio Tinto closed its copper, silver, and gold mine in 1989 due to the war, but had done nothing to clean up the 150,000 tons of tailings it had dumped into local rivers or take responsibility for the havoc the mine had caused. As an adult, Roka Matbob began to wonder why justice had not been done and to gather testimony from people impacted by the mine.<\/p>\n

This led to a successful campaign that persuaded Rio Tinto first to fund an assessment of the mine\u2019s impacts and then to sign a memorandum of understanding in 2024 to act on the assessment\u2019s findings and develop a plan with local communities to remediate the area.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt doesn\u2019t mean we will restore everything as it was, but at least the story that my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren can remember [is] that our grandparents fought,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Alannah Acaq Hurley<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Theonila Roka Matbob secured justice for the impacts of one major mine, Alannah Acaq Hurley helped prevent another one from being dug in the first place.<\/p>\n

Hurley grew up as a member of the Yup\u2019ik\u00a0Indigenous\u00a0group in Alaska\u2019s Bristol Bay, a haven of biodiversity that also hosts the world\u2019s largest wild sockeye salmon run. But in 2001 a new danger emerged: Canadian company Northern Dynasty Minerals announced plans to construct the Pebble Mine, the largest open-pit mine in North America.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe pit would be so big, you could literally see it from the moon,\u201d Hurley said in a video. \u201cIt didn\u2019t take long for us to understand the level of threat that this mine posed\u2014acid mine drainage, toxic tailings left in perpetuity. It was not a matter of if something goes wrong, it was a matter of when.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chosen to lead the United Tribes of Bristol Bay in 2013, Hurley built a coalition to oppose the mine, uniting tribes, commercial fishers, and environmentalists to make their cause to the US\u00a0Environmental Protection Agency\u00a0and push back against the company\u2019s multiple attempts to move forward with the copper-and-gold\u00a0mining\u00a0project. Finally, in 2023, the EPA\u00a0canceled\u00a0<\/a> the project via its rarely used veto power.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just really a testament to the power of the people,\u201d she said. \u201cWe just never stopped until we were heard.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yuvelis Morales Blanco<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yuvelis Morales Blanco also defended her community from an extractive industry.<\/p>\n

Blanco was born to subsistence fishers on Colombia\u2019s Magdalena River in the Afro-Colombian community of Puerto Wilches.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had nothing but the river\u2014she was like a mother who took care of me,\u201d she said in a statement.<\/p>\n

However, even as a child she saw the river was threatened by oil spills from Ecopetrol, Colombia\u2019s leading oil company headquartered nearby. The potential threat level was raised even further when she learned while attending college in 2019 that Ecopetrol planned to build two pilot fracking projects near Puerto Wilches.<\/p>\n

\u201cMan, I\u2019m like, \u2018They\u2019re going to do that in Wilches?\u2019 No sir!\u2019\u201d she recalled in a video.<\/p>\n

Blanco joined the Colombia Free from Fracking Alliance and began to raise awareness in her community about the plans. As the campaign\u2019s momentum grew, so did her reputation as a spokesperson. This ultimately led to threats of violence against her that forced her to seek asylum in\u00a0France\u00a0in 2022, yet she continued to mobilize against the fracking plans from abroad.<\/p>\n

She and the alliance saw success in 2022, as a local court halted the permitting process, newly elected President Gustavo Petro pledged there would be no fracking during his administration, and Ecopetrol suspended its contracts. In 2024, the Colombian Constitutional Court further ruled that the fracking projects had violated the Afro-Colombian community of Puerto Wilches\u2019 right to free, prior, and informed consent.<\/p>\n

Blanco continues to fight for a ban on fracking and for legal protections for environmental defenders\u2014over 140 of whom were reported missing or killed in 2024, the most recent year for which Global Witness\u00a0has a full tally.<\/a> Colombia was also the most dangerous countries for defenders that year, with 48 deaths.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am very hopeful because I have a river that always accompanies me, and I know we\u2019re going to win,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The Goldman Environmental Prize was founded in 1989 by Rhoda and Richard Goldman, and has since honored 239 winners in 37 years. The 2026 awards will be presented live in San Francisco on Monday evening at 8:30 pm ET. Watch it on YouTube\u00a0here.<\/p>\n

– – – – – –<\/p>\n

If you wish to make a comment on this article, you may write to coordinator@cpnn-world.org with the title “Comment on (name of article)” and we will put your comment on line. Because of the flood of spam, we have discontinued the direct application of comments.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

. . SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT . . An article by Olivia Rosane from Common Dreams (reprinted according to \u00a0Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) The Goldman Environmental Foundation\u00a0announced\u00a0 the six winners of the\u00a02026 Goldman Environmental Prize\u00a0on Monday, honoring an all-female slate of advocates who protected\u00a0wildlife, took on extractive industries, and won important legal victories in the movement … Continue reading \u2018This Is a Fight for Humanity\u2019: Meet the 2026 Winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76,10],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-39385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-global","category-sustainable","tag-global"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39385"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39395,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39385\/revisions\/39395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}