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SAN FRANCISCO — For the first time in the 37-year history of what environmentalists affectionately call the "Green Nobel," every single recipient is a woman. The Goldman Environmental Prize on Tuesday named six grassroots activists — from the plains of Alaska to the oil fields of Colombia, from the lowlands of Papua New Guinea to the forests of Nigeria — as winners of its 2026 awards, marking an unprecedented all-female cohort in the prize's storied history.

The six women will each receive $200,000, the largest award in the world for grassroots environmental activism, at a ceremony at the San Francisco Opera House Tuesday night. Past winners have included Ken Saro-Wiwa, Wangari Maathai and Berta Cáceres — a lineage that elevates the 2026 class into the top tier of climate and conservation heroes on the planet.

The Six Winners And Their Fights

Representing Asia, Borim Kim of South Korea used a youth-led constitutional challenge to force Seoul to strengthen its greenhouse-gas emissions targets. Her organization, Youth 4 Climate Action, argued that the government's weak climate policies violated young Koreans' constitutional rights to life and a healthy environment. The Korean Constitutional Court agreed in 2024, handing down a landmark ruling that has since been cited in climate lawsuits on three continents.

Representing Europe, Sarah Finch of the United Kingdom spent more than a decade fighting oil drilling in southeastern England. Her patient legal campaign culminated in the 2024 Supreme Court decision known as the "Finch ruling," which held that British authorities must factor downstream fossil-fuel emissions into environmental impact assessments — a precedent that has already killed at least six planned drilling projects and is being used as a template by environmental lawyers worldwide.

Representing South and Central America, Yuvelis Morales Blanco of Colombia led a nationwide youth movement that successfully stopped commercial fracking in Colombia before it could begin. Her organization mobilized indigenous communities, small farmers and university students across the Magdalena Medio region to block a series of pilot projects backed by Colombia's largest oil companies and then pushed President Gustavo Petro's government to ban commercial fracking outright.

Representing Islands and Island Nations, Theonila Roka Matbob of Papua New Guinea won what may be the most improbable victory of the six. Thirty-five years after Rio Tinto's catastrophic Panguna copper mine was shut down amid civil unrest, leaving behind a polluted watershed and traumatized communities on the island of Bougainville, Roka Matbob led a campaign that forced the world's second-largest mining company to finally commit to remediation — environmental and social — of the site. She was 31 years old when the agreement was signed.

Representing Africa, Iroro Tanshi of Nigeria rediscovered the short-tailed roundleaf bat in Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary and then built a conservation program around it that has simultaneously protected Nigeria's last remaining cloud forest. Her work has expanded from a single species into a broader conservation movement that trains local women as bat biologists and forest guardians.

Representing North America, Alannah Acaq Hurley of the Yup'ik Nation in Alaska led a twenty-year battle to stop the Pebble Mine — a proposed gold and copper megamine at the headwaters of Bristol Bay, home to the world's largest remaining sockeye salmon run. In 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a final determination effectively barring the project under the Clean Water Act, capping a campaign in which Hurley and her community organization, United Tribes of Bristol Bay, outlasted two multinational mining companies and three presidential administrations.

A Historic First — And A Reflection Of A Changed Movement

The all-female slate, organizers said, was not an affirmative-action exercise. "We simply chose the six most compelling grassroots leaders from the six regions," said Susie Gelman, president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, at a Monday pre-announcement briefing. "It happened that they were all women. We think that says something about where the movement is right now."

Researchers have spent the last decade documenting what is sometimes called the "feminization of climate activism." A 2023 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change found that women lead roughly 60 percent of grassroots environmental organizations globally, despite being underrepresented at the executive and governmental levels. In communities most directly affected by pollution, deforestation and climate disruption — subsistence fishing villages, indigenous territories, frontline agricultural regions — the percentage climbs higher still.

The Stakes In 2026

This year's prize lands in a moment of acute uncertainty for the global climate movement. Greenhouse-gas emissions hit another record in 2025. The Trump administration's second-term rollback of Biden-era climate regulations has chilled investment in American clean-energy manufacturing. And the ongoing Middle East conflict has pushed oil prices to levels that make new fossil-fuel extraction newly profitable for companies that had begun to hedge toward renewables.

Against that backdrop, the Goldman Prize winners offered a message that was simultaneously sobering and hopeful. "When governments fail, communities don't," Hurley said in prepared remarks released ahead of the ceremony. "Bristol Bay is still open. The salmon are still coming back. That didn't happen because Washington decided to help us. It happened because thousands of Yup'ik and Dena'ina people said no — and kept saying no for twenty years."

What Comes Next For Each Winner

The $200,000 prize carries no strings; winners choose how to deploy it. Morales Blanco, the Colombian anti-fracking activist, said she will use her share to fund legal defense for community leaders facing harassment from extractive industries. Finch, the British lawyer, plans to subsidize environmental-impact challenges in jurisdictions where plaintiffs cannot afford the steep costs of climate litigation. Kim will expand Youth 4 Climate Action's chapter network into Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines.

Roka Matbob will direct resources toward rehabilitating Panguna's poisoned river system. Tanshi will broaden her bat-conservation and forest-guardian training programs across West Africa. Hurley will reinvest in United Tribes of Bristol Bay's monitoring and political-organizing capacity to defend the EPA decision against what she expects will be future industry challenges.

The Goldman Legacy

The Goldman Environmental Prize was established in 1989 by the late San Francisco philanthropists Richard and Rhoda Goldman. In the decades since, it has recognized more than 230 grassroots environmental heroes from over 100 countries. Some winners have gone on to global acclaim. Others — including at least seven — have been assassinated for their work, a grim reminder that environmental activism remains one of the most dangerous forms of civic engagement on the planet.

Tuesday night's ceremony will include a memorial segment for Honduran activist Berta Cáceres, the 2015 Goldman laureate who was murdered in 2016, and for the dozens of grassroots environmentalists — the vast majority of them indigenous — who have been killed in the decade since. For the six women stepping onto the San Francisco Opera House stage Tuesday night, that memorial is not a historical footnote. It is the reason the Goldman Prize exists in the first place — and the reason, they said, that they keep fighting.