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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."