Women in Climate Leadership: Meet 10 leaders who refuse to let the climate crisis go unchecked

After working on international climate policy for the Obama administration, Allen saw that countries weren't prioritizing a main driver of the crisis: the food and agriculture system.

The industry is responsible for an estimated one-third of global greenhouse-gas emissions. But signatories of the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit global warming by slashing emissions, were mainly focused on energy and transportation. While those areas are important, Allen said, she realized that a rapid transformation of the food supply would likely be driven by companies, not governments.

We have to have more direct relationships with suppliers, processors, and farmers.

Allen, 40, made the jump in 2017 to the candymaker Mars Inc., where she was the climate and land senior manager. She guided the company's work to cut emissions from its complex food supply, including developing a strategy to stop deforestation in the production of cocoa and palm oil — key ingredients in Mars' candies such as M&M's and Snickers — as well as beef, soy, pulp, and paper.

That experience taught her that in order to shrink their climate impacts, food companies have to rethink the way they source ingredients. The old-school approach of buying agricultural commodities off the global market without knowing where or how they were grown is out the window, Allen said.

"That's the way the food system has operated for years, and it's broken," she said. "We have to have more direct relationships with suppliers, processors, and farmers."

Allen is applying the lesson to her role as the chief sustainability officer at Oatly, the Swedish company that pioneered an oat-milk craze and encourages people through quirky marketing to adopt a more plant-based diet.

Allen joined Oatly in 2020 as it continued a global expansion. The company aims to reduce the carbon intensity of its products by 70% per liter by 2029. This involves helping farmers move toward more sustainable operations, Allen said.

"We're looking at how much energy and fertilizer they use, as well as the farmers' own experience," Allen said. "We want to ensure farmers are reaping some of the benefits of producing a higher-value product."

Courtois said it's no accident that 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity can be found on lands managed and beloved by Indigenous peoples.

Take the boreal forest that stretches across Canada and into Alaska. It's the largest intact forest left on Earth, and also been home to Indigenous peoples for thousands of years, Courtois said. 

The forest is akin to the planet's lungs, absorbing more carbon per hectare than any other land-based ecosystem. It's second only to the oceans in terms of the capacity to suck carbon from the atmosphere.

Courtois, 45, is a member of the Ilnu community of Mashteuiatsh but has lived in Goose Bay, Labrador, for two decades. She's a professional forester who's long been at the forefront of Indigenous-led conservation efforts in the region, including as the executive director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, founded in 2013. The nonprofit works on establishing Indigenous protected and conserved areas recognized by the federal government. The group also founded what's known as the Indigenous Guardians program, which has about 150 programs across the country.

To protect land and water, we needed to strengthen our nations.

Courtois said these guardians are the "eyes and ears" on the land and act as an expression of Indigenous peoples' stewardship responsibilities. They work on land-use planning and sustainable development. They also build relationships among Indigenous peoples' nations and with federal and provincial governments in Canada.

Courtois said Indigenous nations are creating well more than 500,000 square kilometers of protected areas. That's an area about the size of Spain.

She added that Canada is emerging from a "dark colonial period" and is amid reconciliation between the government and Indigenous peoples. Working with nations on land conservation is part of that process, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has recognized that doing so is the only way the country can meet its international climate and biodiversity commitments, Courtois said.

"To protect land and water, we needed to strengthen our nations," Courtois said.

Enobakhare doesn't consider herself an environmentalist in the traditional sense. But when she joined the Environmental Protection Agency in 2013, she quickly learned the agency's role is largely about protecting public health, especially in vulnerable communities like the one she grew up in.

Enobakhare is a native of Jackson, Mississippi, which she visited last year at the height of a water crisis that left more than 140,000 predominantly Black residents without clean drinking water. Enobakhare joined three of the trips made by the EPA's administrator, Michael Regan, to meet with local officials, faith groups, and residents to discuss the emergency response and long-term fixes to the city's failing water infrastructure.

The trip reminded Enobakhare why it's important that the EPA has employees like her who look like the communities they engage with.

"It helps build trust," Enobakhare, 36, told Insider. "I'm a hometown native, so I understood the intricacies of the community and what was happening on the ground. That helped inform some of the decisions the administrator made and also with forming authentic connections with people."

How do we break those [barriers] down and make sure communities get access to this funding? That is a priority for us.

Enobakhare said that in her day-to-day role leading the EPA's Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education, she coordinates a dialogue between the agency and the American public, from businesses to environmental-justice advocates to moms worried about public health.

Enobakhare's office was the architect of Regan's "Journey to Justice" tour through marginalized communities in Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Puerto Rico. Enobakhare said that seeing the environmental injustices firsthand, as well as the work communities are doing to mitigate those harms, is key as the EPA doles out $100 billion it received under President Joe Biden's bipartisan infrastructure and climate laws.

"Barriers of entry are high when it comes to government dollars," she said. "So how do we break those down and make sure communities get access to this funding? That is a priority for us."

Enobakhare added that she's helping the agency create a pipeline of young and diverse employees by working with historically Black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions.

Margolin is playing a burned-out young climate activist in her film for a college thesis project — so more or less herself, just exaggerated.

"It's like a comedy-drama satire," Margolin, a junior at New York University, told Insider of the film, called "Doomers." It's about a former youth climate activist and a former NASA climate scientist who go out for a night of hedonistic destruction to celebrate giving up on fighting the climate crisis.

"The lesson of the story is not to throw our hands up," Margolin said. "It's just exploring the psyche of people who are like, 'Hope comes in action!' but have taken action all their life and see how messed up things still are. What would that drive people to be like?"

Margolin, 21, isn't giving up the fight. But she's been an activist since she was 14 — cofounding the advocacy group Zero Hour, writing a guidebook with Greta Thunberg for other young organizers, leading marches across the country, meeting with politicians and celebrities — she needed a break.

Margolin started to worry that the youth climate movement had inadvertently created a capitalistic monster. Activists became social-media influencers and got brand deals. So many companies, even big polluters or those with sweatshops in their supply chains, talk about sustainability and climate justice. Meanwhile, politicians, including Biden, continue to approve fossil-fuel projects like the Willow Project in Alaska.

"Corporations and politicians have exploited the youth climate movement," Margolin said. "I had to intentionally take a step back and recenter myself."

These are the people who are fighting and putting themselves on the line that have been ignored and mistreated, or the opposite — targeted and murdered.

Attending NYU helped. She didn't have enough hours in the day to take classes and lead a grassroots organization.

Now Margolin is focused on filmmaking as a form of activism. Margolin's passion project is an animated film, "Pelea," which means fight in Spanish, that centers on land defenders in a fictional country who go up against extractive industries. It isn't finished, but Margolin has been collaborating with other artists around the world.

Margolin is Colombian American and grew up in Seattle. Her mom was raised in Bogotá.  Margolin said she recognizes her privilege compared with Indigenous peoples on the front lines in Latin America. But she also wants to understand her family heritage and the land defenders whom she admires and to whom she feels indebted.

"These are the people who are fighting and putting themselves on the line that have been ignored and mistreated, or the opposite — targeted and murdered," Margolin said.

She wants to uplift those voices and stories in her films.

In 2008, Muchiri was trying to decide which field of engineering she wanted to pursue when something clicked.

Muchiri, who grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, remembered when her grandmother, who lived in a rural area, went from living in a mud hut to living in a stone house with a solar panel on its roof for electricity.

"This meant we could stay at her house longer instead of returning to the city before sunset," Muchiri, 32, told Insider. "At the time, I didn't know it was called renewable energy."

Muchiri chose to study renewable-energy engineering, joining a field dominated by men. An analysis by the International Renewable Energy Agency found that women represented 32% of the global renewable energy workforce in 2019.

We have some of the world's best wind resources, but people don't know that. We've only tapped 0.01% of the potential.

After she graduated, Muchiri worked for a commercial real-estate company in Australia aggregating buyers for the energy generated by wind farms. But something was missing; she wanted to be developing renewable-energy projects.

Muchiri returned to Kenya and joined the nonprofit Hivos East Africa, which worked with a blockchain company and local governments to bring solar power and energy storage to off-the-grid communities and allow them to trade excess power.

The Global Wind Energy Council, a trade association, chose Muchiri for its first women leadership program in 2019 and honored her with an award for young innovators the following year. Wangari was also selected as an Obama Foundation leader for Africa.

When the Global Wind Energy Council decided to establish a presence in Africa, it called Muchiri. Her role as director for Africa WindPower involves hosting workshops for government officials, utilities, and developers to build relationships and get more projects off the ground.

"I'm learning that there hasn't been an African face for wind energy," Muchiri said. "We have some of the world's best wind resources, but people don't know that. We've only tapped 0.01% of the potential."

Muchiri described Kenya, which already is mostly powered by geothermal, hydro, wind, and solar, as a model for other African countries pursuing renewable energy.

Nakagawa's career has taken her from nonprofits to politics to business and given her a broad view of climate policy.

She started as an attorney for the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council before advising Sen. John Kerry while he served as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. When Kerry became the secretary of state during the Obama administration, Nakagawa joined him and led the State Department's efforts to help support and finance other countries' clean-energy goals.

The Paris Agreement was the culmination of so many years and months of engagement with governments at all levels to reach this global consensus that we all have a role to play in solving the climate challenge.

Nakagawa, 43, had a front-row seat to the negotiations for the Paris Agreement, which nearly 200 countries signed in December 2015. She said it was one of her proudest moments; she'd spent many late nights trying to get the accord over the finish line.

"The Paris Agreement was the culmination of so many years and months of engagement with governments at all levels to reach this global consensus that we all have a role to play in solving the climate challenge, while also recognizing that we have to support the most vulnerable," Nakagawa told Insider.

Since then, Nakagawa has worked at a venture-capital firm that funds climate-tech companies. She also served as a special assistant to Biden and as a senior director for climate and energy on the White House National Security Council.

Nakagawa said her career moves were driven by where she thought she could make the most impact, which is why she joined Microsoft in January. Nakagawa said the company has some of the most ambitious climate goals, such as aiming to be carbon-negative by 2030 and to remove its historical greenhouse-gas emissions from the atmosphere by 2050.

"That was a clear signal of the importance this company places on sustainability," Nakagawa said. "What an incredible place to be to help scale that change."

Monsoon rains and flooding in Pakistan last summer killed more than 1,700 people and displaced some 30 million — just before world leaders gathered in Egypt for the United Nations' climate summit.

The disaster became a rallying point for developing countries that bear little responsibility for the climate crisis yet are suffering the brunt of its impacts. A group of international scientists determined that global warming likely intensified the heavy rainfall in Pakistan.

As Pakistan's federal minister for climate change, Rehman helped push the issue of "loss and damage" to the top of the climate-summit agenda for the first time. She implored world leaders to establish a fund that would compensate developing countries for the destruction they're already experiencing due to wealthy countries' greenhouse-gas emissions.

We need to reimagine the whole financing pool and tap big business and multinational corporations, which are generating billions in profits.

World leaders left Egypt with a historic agreement to set up the fund for vulnerable countries. But that's just the first step.

"I called it a down payment on our future," Rehman told Insider. "But the check still remains blank."

Rehman said she'd continue to press for international climate finance, not just for loss and damage but also for adaptation projects that would help Pakistan and other vulnerable countries prepare for extreme weather. Rehman said the funding should include more grants, rather than loans, because countries shouldn't have to take on more debt to rebuild from climate disasters.

Pakistan is amid an economic crisis, with inflation soaring to its highest levels in decades, in part because the severe floods last year devastated agricultural production. As of March, nearly 2 million people still lived in stagnant floodwater, according to the UN.

"The climate financing system is quite broken," Rehman said. "It does not address the very real needs of the developing world. We need to reimagine the whole financing pool and tap big business and multinational corporations, which are generating billions in profits."

Though Pakistan is thought to emit less than 1% of global emissions, the country is taking action to address the climate crisis and improve air quality in its cities, which are some of the most polluted in the world, Rehman said. Still, it will be hard to achieve those goals without international funds.

Seiger describes herself as a bit of a futurist.

Creating business models has been a through line of her career. She helped build one of the first web-advertising networks during the dot-com boom and a carbon-offset company in 2004, well before those industries attracted buzz.

Seiger, 48, has since worked on finding new ways to finance a climate-resilient economy, including helping pension funds, foundations, and other investors develop decarbonization strategies. She's a lecturer at Stanford Law School and managing director of both the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance and the Sustainable Finance Initiative at the Precourt Institute for Energy.

"Teaching was not something I ever thought I would do," Seiger told Insider. "But I was on my soapbox for so long about how future leaders need an education about the tools, data, and frameworks for managing climate risk and opportunity."

Beyond teaching, Seiger has been described as a "pension-fund whisperer," having advised government officials in New York and California on how to lower the carbon footprint of state pension funds. Seiger also is a board member of Prime Coalition, a nonprofit launched in 2014 that has pooled more than $300 million from philanthropic donors and backed 30 climate startups often seen as too risky by mainstream investors.

Disclosure can be a useful tool, but it is not the same exercise as tracking actual emissions through a complex global economy.

Seiger's current passion is the subject of a book she cowrote, "Settling Climate Accounts: Navigating the Road to Net Zero." The book explores why the many net-zero pledges that companies and governments have made won't add up and proposes how to correct the course. Seiger said that to arrive at net-zero emissions, institutions need to move from counting and disclosing carbon to accounting for carbon.

"Disclosure can be a useful tool, but it is not the same exercise as tracking actual emissions through a complex global economy," Seiger said. "E-liability accounting is the first mechanism I've seen that achieves this goal."

E-liability accounting, first proposed by faculty at Oxford and Harvard, is similar to financial accounting on a balance sheet. But rather than costs, emissions are recorded from raw materials through the production and sale of goods and services. Seiger and her colleagues at Stanford are expanding on this.

Velani knows what it's like to live in outdated housing with environmental risks that so many low-income communities face in America.

She said that as undocumented immigrants from Mumbai, her family moved to a basement apartment in Chicago that regularly flooded. They turned on the gas stove to keep warm during frigid winters.

That upbringing shaped Velani's work in sustainable urban development. Velani, 35, has spent more than a decade finding ways to finance big infrastructure projects to help cities both mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis while also improving affordable housing. She's worked at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank and in the administration of former New York mayor Bill de Blasio. She also supports new startups.

At Streetlife, we are focused on marrying the product-development process of that early-stage startup with the policy planning of cities.

Velani helped design New York's OneNYC plan, known as its version of the Green New Deal, that outlined $15 billion worth of investments and 30 strategies to achieve net-zero emissions, including using more-sustainable building materials, expanding a bike-share system, and building clean-energy projects that create jobs.

One project that stayed with Velani was in the Rockaways, a peninsula of seaside neighborhoods. In this section of Queens, there are now thousands of new affordable-housing units and a sewer system designed to withstand more extreme rainfall and storms.

The work in city government gave Velani an idea for her own venture-capital firm, Streetlife Ventures, which is in its first fundraising round and says it plans to invest in the "nuts and bolts" of building sustainable cities. Velani said she saw how entrepreneurs often pitched public officials when it was too late, so their inventions wouldn't be incorporated into urban-development plans.

"At Streetlife, we are focused on marrying the product-development process of that early-stage startup with the policy planning of cities," Velani told Insider. The firm also has a storytelling platform, Parachute, to highlight climate solutions in cities and the people implementing them.

Velani also found time to cofound the networking group New York Climate Tech last year. The group organizes happy hours and a speaker series and has grown to about 4,000 people.

"I am the recipient of a lot of mentorship," Velani said. "I want to do that for up-and-comers."

Walton didn't talk about sustainability as a kid, but her family practiced it out of necessity. Growing up Black and poor meant avoiding food waste, conserving water and energy, wearing secondhand clothes, and sharing resources with neighbors, she told Insider.

Only as Walton became an adult did she see how those values, demonstrated by her mom and grandmother, shaped her career as a climate-justice organizer and fundraiser.

"If we actually value communities of color and women of color, who are leading transformational change, building power, shaping climate consciousness, and legislating policy, then we need to fund them like we never have before.

Walton in 2020 became the president and CEO of The Solutions Project, where she has personally raised $60 million and also worked with other donors to move a total of $112 million to community organizations, led mostly by women of color, pushing for clean air, water, energy, and transportation in places overburdened by pollution. 

Through this work, Walton is also leading a conversation about racial justice in the predominantly white world of philanthropy.

"If we actually value communities of color and women of color, who are leading transformational change, building power, shaping climate consciousness, and legislating policy, then we need to fund them like we never have before," Walton said.

The Solutions Project has provided grants to 283 groups including Uprose in Brooklyn, New York, which long advocated for transforming an industrial park into a wind-energy hub; West Street Recovery in Houston, a disaster-recovery effort formed during Hurricane Harvey; and a network of labor and community groups in South Central Los Angeles advocating for transforming the Slauson Corridor, one of the most environmentally and economically disadvantaged areas of California. Projects involve adding green spaces, solar panels, and electric-vehicle charging, as well as protecting people from being displaced by gentrification.

Those efforts in South Central Los Angeles are deeply personal to Walton. She spent 16 years at a community group that's involved, known as Scope. About a decade of her time there was as its president and CEO. Walton said that under her leadership, Scope transformed its mission from economic justice to climate justice.

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