Climate Action 30: Top global leaders addressing the climate crisis in 2023

Abdulla Al Mandous is a meteorologist and the president of the World Meteorological Organization, a UN agency dedicated to weather, climate, and water resources.

Mandous, who holds a Ph.D. in meteorology from the University of Belgrade in Serbia, has worked for the WMO for 30 years. He joined after completing a degree in meteorology — "I became a meteorologist by luck," he said — as a principal delegate from the United Arab Emirates. Over that time, he's seen the WMO's mission change. When Mandous started his career, he said that the WMO's central focus was monitoring and forecasting weather events. Today, it puts a lot more effort into research on the climate crisis.

"We have a big network," Mandous told Business Insider, citing the WMO's numerous weather stations, data centers, and radar networks. "This should be used for the climate." 

One of Mandous' goals is to turn the Early Warnings for All initiative — a project that provides warning systems for communities at risk of extreme weather events — into reality. He said that he hoped to secure funding at the upcoming COP28 conference to "close the gap of monitoring" in countries in the Global South.

"We have a lot of missing gaps in the countries, especially in Africa and small islands, and we want to initiate alarm systems that will warn those countries for that," Mandous said.

Andrew Baker, a marine biologist at the University of Miami, researches coral reefs and the climate crisis. He has been fascinated by the ocean since he was young and "never grew out of that," he told Business Insider. 

His defining moment came during his Ph.D. research on coral-algal symbiosis — the relationship between coral and their symbiotic algae that powers reef growth — when the 1997-1998 El Niño event triggered coral bleaching. 

Bleaching happens when coral release their algal symbionts after being exposed to warmer temperatures. "It turned out that some algal symbionts were very resistant to high temperature. They didn't get bleached from the coral, and the coral survived," Baker said. 

The observation put his work at the center of understanding how coral reefs respond to the climate crisis. 

Baker continued his work and grew his team over the next 2 ½ decades. This year, he said, they released a first-of-its-kind paper showing how algal symbionts' thermal tolerance can impact a whole reef system. Healthy reefs are full of biodiversity and underpin fisheries, drug discovery, and tourism. Baker's research is an important step toward helping to increase coral reefs' resilience. 

Reefs also act as coastline protection and mitigate flooding. Today, Baker leads an interdisciplinary project to design climate-resilient hybrid reefs that combine artificial structures with coral. The coral will be engineered to handle warmer temperatures for both ecosystem restoration and coastline protection, as reefs also help absorb waves, mitigate flooding, and prevent erosion.

Throughout her career, Asmeret Asefaw Berhe has been driven by her fascination with the world beneath our feet.

"That thin layer of soil that covers the land surface represents the difference between life and lifelessness in the earth system because pretty much all terrestrial life has to depend on soil," Berhe told Business Insider.

Berhe is a biogeochemist, a political ecologist, and the director of the US Office of Science. She has a Ph.D. in biogeochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. Before taking the role at the Office of Science, she was a professor of soil biogeochemistry at the University of California, Merced. 

One of the biggest achievements of her career, she said, has been raising awareness about the importance of soil, especially as a climate-crisis solution.

"It really controls the fluxes of these greenhouse gasses from land to the atmosphere," Berhe said. She added that the soil ecosystem was "being degraded in a major and unprecedented way."

In her role as director at the Office of Science, the largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the US, one of Berhe's top priorities has been equity.

"The work that the public is funding has to be inclusive, accessible to everyone," Berhe said. She cited the office's launch of the Urban Integrated Field Labs as a key example. The program pairs scientists with local communities in inner cities and promotes research on adapting urban environments to the climate crisis.

"To me, we can't address the climate crisis if we cannot approach this issue with a perspective that's grounded in environmental justice," Berhe said. "And we cannot really pursue true environmental justice if we're not addressing these issues of inequity and lack of representation in STEM that we keep having decade after decade."

Sigrid Heuer is a research scientist who has worked in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia on genetic diversity and molecular breeding to develop resilient crops and mitigate the effects of the climate crisis on food security. 

Heuer, who holds a Ph.D. in molecular plant biology, was part of the team that developed flood-tolerant rice for India and Bangladesh, which would give farmers respite from short-term flooding. Today, she's known for her work on heat-tolerance mechanisms for breeding temperature-resilient crops such as wheat and beans.

Many countries are now facing long droughts followed by massive floods, Heuer said. 

"You need management solutions for that; you need water management and a plan on how to deal with climate change, but crop resilience can have a massive impact on that." Heat-tolerant plants could prevent significant yield losses due to climate change, she added. 

Heuer noted that there's a lack of women in leadership positions in science and applied research, and she hopes to inspire more women to enter the field. "The other part of impact is training the next generation of scientists," she said. Heuer has taught students from across the world, many of whom have joined international research groups, she said. Two former students described their field work as "life-changing," she added.

The scientist has now moved into consulting and plans to work with philanthropic foundations to channel capital into climate-resilience projects across the world.

Ermias Kebreab is a professor and associate dean at the University of California, Davis' agriculture and environment department, where he researches methane reduction in livestock through a food-justice lens.

Methane has accounted for 30% of the rise in global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution; it stays in the atmosphere for less time than CO2, but is 80 times more potent over a 20-year period. Agriculture — cows, other ruminant animals, and rice paddies — is responsible for a third of methane emissions. 

By finding new ways to feed livestock to reduce or eliminate methane, Kebreab, who has a Ph.D. in ecological modeling, wants to help create more sustainable food systems without harming economic development or the health of low-income countries.

He coauthored a study in 2019 that introduced seaweed as a feed additive for dairy cows; it reduced enteric methane emissions by over 50%. The same year, he contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change update on how to measure livestock and manure methane emissions. More recently, he worked on the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's overview of methane emissions in livestock and rice paddies. 

Today, Kebreab is focused on a $70 million project exploring the use of gene-editing technology to edit a cow's gut microbes, which produce methane during digestion, to reduce methane production. 

"This could be a game changer if it works. Obviously, it's a high-risk, high-reward kind of activity," he told Business Insider. 

Imogen Napper is a marine scientist and National Geographic Explorer who has investigated various ways plastic gets into the environment.

Napper's journey began when she was 8 years old and her school released balloons into the air. She wondered where they went and whether they'd end up in the ocean. 

This curiosity characterizes her research, she told Business Insider. Napper is driven by providing scientific answers to those kinds of questions in an effort to create change. "It's giving evidence to consumers, industry, and government about what's happening. From that evidence, we can make more informed decisions," she said.

Her Ph.D. research helped kick-start an international conversation about microbeads in cosmetics, which were ultimately banned in several countries. Napper went on to investigate biodegradable plastic bags and the pollution created by washing laundry. While research had been done to measure the number of fibers that come off clothes during a wash, hers was the first to break it down by different polymer types. Her research found that a single wash of polyester clothing can shed up to 700,000 plastic fibers.

She's now exploring how the lessons from studying ocean pollution can be applied to space, which is becoming increasingly littered with old satellites. 

Napper has also worked on various National Geographic expeditions.

For Nouhad Awwad, faith and environmental values are intertwined. People often view the environment as "something created for their benefit, rather than something that's their duty to preserve," she said. But Awwad believes protecting nature is a core part of her Islamic values.

She works for Ummah for Earth, an alliance of 22 organizations that empowers Muslim communities to tackle the climate crisis. Awwad told Business Insider that talking to people through their faith values could be an effective way to spread awareness and mobilize climate action.

Alongside her campaigning for Ummah for Earth, Awwad is a global outreach coordinator at Greenpeace MENA, which stands for the Middle East and North Africa. She's passionate about coordinating climate action in the Middle East. "I felt that this is something very underrepresented in my community," Awwad said.

Awwad started Lebanon's chapter of the Arab Youth Climate Movement in 2015. She said that socioeconomic factors in Lebanon could make engaging with environmental issues an "elite thing" for young people. Awwad added that a lack of funding and resources had made youth climate action in the Global South trickier.

She created a free training program on solar-panel installation in Arabic, as resources on renewable energy are difficult to access in the language. She said about 2,000 young people applied for the program, and many of the trainees started their own solar-roof-garden initiatives.

Isaias Hernandez is an environmental and social-justice content creator.

Driven by the disparities in access to clean air and green spaces in different areas of Los Angeles and fueled by his teenage asthma diagnosis, Hernandez is committed to change at the intersection of environment, social justice, and equity.

"I had to realize, how do we make a green space green but also equitable through an economic lens?" he told Business Insider. In 2019, Hernandez founded the media platform Queer Brown Vegan to educate others on that intersectionality. He does this through people-led storytelling, which he felt was different from the content that existed at that time.

In response to the 2020 wildfires on the Pacific coast, Hernandez created what he dubbed a "climate-emotion scale" to help people process and discuss eco-anxiety. It gained traction online, and Hernandez said that Gen Z is "redefining the curriculum" with new climate and mental-health resources. 

The creator was also featured on the digital cover of Vogue with Billie Eilish and spoke at the Harvard Chan C-Change Youth Summit as part of the Climate Creators 2023 Program. 

Now, Hernandez wants to help young people find work at sustainable companies. He recently published a series of interviews with businesses to showcase their environmental and social credentials.

Tara Houska is a tribal lawyer and environmental and Indigenous rights activist from Couchiching First Nation.

Houska interned in the first Obama administration and then worked for a law firm in Washington, DC, that lobbies for tribal rights to basic infrastructure needs like schools and hospitals and environmental-justice issues.

She attended her first protest, against Keystone XL, in 2014 and is now known for boots-on-the-ground activism to protect Indigenous land and water. In 2016, Houska spent six months camping and protesting on the front lines of the Dakota Access pipeline resistance at Standing Rock. In 2021, she was arrested for trespassing while taking part in a direct action against the Line 3 oil pipeline. She recently participated in a direct-action protest against the Mountain Valley pipeline, where she was arrested after locking herself to construction equipment. 

Houska also served as a Native American affairs advisor to Bernie Sanders in 2016 and founded an Indigenous women activist group called Giniw Collective in 2018.

"Native folks are the first and worst impacted by the climate crisis. We're the folks who are still deeply in relationship with nature. The extractive-industry projects tend to really disparately impact our people," she told Business Insider. 

Houska is now set on shifting the narrative around climate-crisis solutions and repairing the relationship humans have with nature.

For Cheryl Johnson, pollution is personal. She's a lifelong resident of Altgeld Gardens in Chicago, a neighborhood surrounded by one of the largest concentrations of hazardous-waste sites in the US. She's also the daughter of Hazel Johnson, who is considered the mother of environmental justice. "Keeping her legacy alive is a huge passion of mine," Johnson told Business Insider.

Johnson serves as the executive director of People for Community Recovery, a nonprofit her mother founded to improve the quality of life for communities affected by pollution.

Under her leadership, PCR has prevented hundreds of units in Altgeld Gardens from being torn down, led a program to remove harmful chemicals from residential homes, and stopped another landfill from being constructed in the community.

Poorer communities, Johnson said, are more likely to experience the "devastating" impacts of the climate crisis because they don't have the necessary resources to respond. 

"People are not even aware to be prepared," Johnson said. "We need an environmental-remediation workforce to be able to prepare, to intervene, and to respond to issues that are related to our climate condition.

"This is the work of everybody. It has come to the point where business, industry, community, government, academic institutions sit at the table and look at how we can create precautionary principles to protect public health from any type of natural or manmade catastrophe."

Rarely do movies about climate change become blockbusters. 

Adam McKay's "Don't Look Up" changed the game. The satirical comedy about a comet hurtling toward Earth — and our collective inaction — is a metaphor for the climate crisis. It smashed Netflix's record for viewing hours within the first 28 days of its release and continues to hold second place. It received four Academy Award nominations.

McKay said many movie studios passed on making it because of the ending. Ultimately, the planet gets destroyed. 

"My argument was always twofold. We need to show that there isn't always a happy ending, because with the way climate change is headed, that is not a guarantee," McKay told Business Insider. "And people want this. People are tired of the old story tropes of everything ending up great."

Movies like "Don't Look Up" are a powerful way to influence the public's view of the climate crisis and call out politicians, wealthy executives, and the media for downplaying its severity, McKay said. Stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, and Meryl Streep certainly help.

Despite the success, McKay said some of the response made him realize there is a lot more work to do. He has personally given $4 million to the Climate Emergency Fund, which supports a network of activist groups in the US. He said that throughout history, disruptive protests have led to major societal change. He also felt disillusioned by Washington politicians and big environmental nonprofits. 

In June, one of those activist groups disrupted an event featuring Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who became a millionaire from his family's coal business and carved out concessions for fossil fuels in the Inflation Reduction Act, a major climate law. 

"I told my wife that this is the best money we've ever given," McKay said. 

Earlier this year, McKay founded Yellow Dot Studios, a nonprofit that makes short videos and commercials about the climate crisis. The launch was inspired by a spoof Chevron ad that went viral last year, made by McKay and some colleagues now at Yellow Dot.

"My wife and I will be continuing to give as much as we possibly can, as well as our time and support, to these activists," McKay said. "I really think that's the way it's going to work — a constructive populist movement."

Olivia Vesovich was only 11 the first time the thought of a changing climate terrified her. 

Her sixth-grade class in Missoula, Montana, was learning about the ice and snow in the state's Glacier National Park.

"My teacher told us that my generation's children are going to be the last generation to see the snow and the glaciers," Vesovich, pictured above in a green dress, said. "And I was like, 'No glaciers at Glacier National Park — how can this be?'"

Vesovich, now 20, would go on to face what she called "climate despair." That's part of what led her to join 15 other young people in a lawsuit against Montana, Held v. Montana, which accused the state of depriving them of the clean environment they're entitled to under Montana's constitution. In August, a judge ruled that by allowing fossil-fuel development, the state was violating the young people's rights.

The legal action by the young plaintiffs, only one of whom was old enough to vote when the trial began, marked the first constitutional case on climate change to go to trial in the US. 

Montana has said it plans to appeal. Nonetheless, Vesovich said she's excited about the outcome of the trial because it could provide a blueprint for other cases. While only a handful of states have the constitutional guarantees Montana does, Vesovich said the ruling gave her hope that leaders would be forced to listen to those most at risk from a changing climate. 

Already, the law firm that led the Montana suit has filed a motion in Hawaii on behalf of a group of 14 youth activists. The group sued the Hawaii Department of Transportation last year over greenhouse-gas emissions related to transportation. It's one more sign for Vesovich of the impact the Montana win has had.

"They can't not listen," she said. "They can't look away."

Ayisha Siddiqa is a human-rights and environmental activist. Growing up in Pakistan, Siddiqa saw the effects of pollution firsthand when members of her family and community became ill from unsafe drinking water, and she learned that conflict and war are linked to resource demand.

Later, Siddiqa asked herself: "What is the most pertinent issue for me, which cause would I need to answer to my children for in the future? For me, that is the environmental cause." 

In 2020, she cofounded the youth-activist coalition Polluters Out and helped launch an activist training course called Fossil Free University. More recently, Siddiqa together with other activists successfully lobbied for the Loss and Damage Fund at COP27 to support the countries that are harmed the most by the effects of the climate crisis and to force fossil-fuel lobbyists to identify themselves when registering for COP28. 

Siddiqa currently serves as a youth climate advisor to the UN secretary-general. She's also on the steering committee of the Youth Climate Justice Fund, which aims to be the largest youth-led regranter in the climate space — meaning it secures grants to issue them to others. Looking ahead, she wants to continue her legislative work and help protect the planet for future generations. 

The urgency of the situation is what keeps Siddiqa going. "There's nothing more to lose, and nothing more left at risk," she said. 

Esther An is the chief sustainability officer at City Developments Limited, or CDL, a real-estate company in Singapore. 

CDL was Southeast Asia's first real-estate conglomerate to sign the World Green Building Council's Net Zero Carbon Buildings Commitment in February 2021. Under An's leadership, the company has committed to offsetting new developments by 2030 and getting all its buildings to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

"I see my role as a catalyst," An told Business Insider. She said that construction sites were big polluters when she started her career. She played a pivotal role in creating CDL's corporate character and setting up its sustainability portfolio. "I think establishing the ethos of conserving as we construct is very fundamental," she said.

An has championed sustainability reporting and ESG-disclosure practices within her field. She published the first sustainability report using Global Reporting Initiative, or GRI, standards in Singapore in 2008 and it remains an important part of her approach. "If you don't measure, you can't manage," An said.

She's also passionate about education and empowerment. She said she was particularly proud of the CDL Green Gallery at the Singapore Botanic Gardens Heritage Museum, which hosts exhibitions about the climate crisis and sustainable living. An said that the gallery is "net zero" and runs on solar power.

Lisa P. Jackson has always been driven by her desire to protect people and the planet. "Devastating storms like Katrina that destroyed the home I grew up in have shown us the consequences of inaction," she told Business Insider. 

Jackson, who has a background in chemical engineering, had a two-decade career in public service before joining the corporate world. She served under President Barack Obama as the administrator of the Environment Protection Agency, where she led the EPA's response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, took action on air and water quality, and made environmental justice a key priority. She joined Apple in 2013. 

"My entire career has been motivated by the mission to protect people's health and the environment was a great motivator for me. Joining Apple was an opportunity to continue my life's work to drive climate progress forward globally," she said. 

Apple has helped suppliers improve sustainability for over a decade, and its facilities have run on 100% renewable energy since 2018, Jackson said. While Apple has faced criticism for its frequent product launches, which encourage consumers to upgrade their devices regularly, the company plans to make every product carbon neutral by the end of the decade and eliminate plastic packaging by 2025.

Jackson also leads Apple's more than $200 million global Racial Equity and Justice Initiative to expand opportunities for Black, Hispanic, Latinx, and Indigenous communities.

In her role as chief impact officer at Galvanize Climate Solutions, a climate-focused global investment firm, Nicole Systrom leads a team of experts across science and technology, policy, and markets.

Systrom supports investors to make "as much climate impact as possible," she said. Galvanize has three strategies — a venture strategy, a public-equity strategy, and a real-estate strategy — all focused on decarbonization in different ways, she said.

"I hope they'll become a model for other investors to follow in the future," Systrom said.

Systrom said that climate technology needed capital to close the "financing gap." In September, Galvanize announced the final close of its Innovation + Expansion Fund at over $1 billion, which is one of the largest climate venture funds raised to date. Systrom described the fund as "pretty remarkable."

"We need all different parts of the investment ecosystem, all different asset classes, all types of investors, really activated towards climate transition. I think there's a role for every type of investor to play," Systrom said.

Systrom also serves on the steering committee of a group called the Venture Climate Alliance, which formed in April. It's seeking to shape a net-zero standard for the venture industry and "try to drive consensus around the role venture capitalists should be playing," she said.

Reformation began as a vintage boutique in Los Angeles in 2009 but soon became known for making simple, sexy dresses worn by celebrities including Rihanna and Taylor Swift. 

Kathleen Talbot joined the company in 2014, about a year after Reformation launched its website and started selling clothes worldwide.

"At that time, I don't think many people even associated the clothes in their closet with climate change," Talbot said. "So it was fun to try and set the standard in what was still a very niche market."

Since then, Talbot has helped Reformation become a leader in sustainable fashion and transparency. The company says more than 70% of its materials are recycled or "regenerative," meaning they are made from animal- and plant-based fibers grown on farms using practices that address climate change. Less than 2% of the material it uses are synthetic fabrics made from petrochemicals, such as nylon. 

Reformation aims to use as little new material as possible and reduce waste in order to become "climate positive" by 2025, which involves removing more greenhouse-gas emissions from the atmosphere than the company produces. About a third of its carbon footprint comes from the virgin materials it uses, including cashmere, silk, and viscose. Reformation's road map calls for using more recycled wool and eliminating silk, as well as buying carbon offsets that remove carbon from the atmosphere as opposed to avoiding emissions.  

"The fashion industry is throwing away almost the same amount of materials we are generating every year," Talbot said. "If we just connect those dots and circulate these raw materials, we can eliminate waste and emissions."

In March 2022, Reformation launched RefRecycling so customers can drop off their old clothes at retail locations. And shoppers won't find racks and racks of clothing at its stores. Reformation releases limited collections every week, and only makes more if the sales demand it, to limit waste. About 16% of its sales come from vintage, rental, or resale.

It's a different model than fast fashion, which emits about 10% of greenhouse gasses globally and makes 40 billion garments every year that are never sold.

Reformation is also getting into politics. It's one of a handful of brands that has endorsed legislation in New York state and Congress that would require more transparency in fashion supply chains.

Etosha Cave started Twelve in 2015 while she was a grad student at Stanford University, along with her fellow graduate students Kendra Kuhl and Nicholas Flanders.

Cave, who holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, and Kuhl developed a carbon-transformation technology that can take carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into products including shoes, clothes, and electronics. The technology can even make a sustainable aviation fuel, called E-Jet, according to Cave.

"Carbon is such a ubiquitous molecule — it's used in so many things," Cave told Business Insider. "If we can provide this air-based carbon, instead of fossil-based carbon, we can start to shift away from fossil fuels."

Twelve is collaborating with major partners such as Microsoft, Alaska Airlines, and the US Air Force to advance the development of its sustainable E-Jet fuel. "For every gallon of sustainable aviation fuel we can make, we're displacing a gallon of fossil fuels," Cave said.

The shift from grad school to running a startup has had its challenges, but for Cave, this is a "golden era" for climate tech. She cited the Inflation Reduction Act as an example of a "unique alignment of policy and technology and public opinion."

"This is kind of an all-hands-on-deck moment," she said. "We need lots of people and lots of technologies working toward reducing our CO2 emissions."

Some 2 billion solar panels are installed around the world. That number is rapidly rising as countries expand renewable energy. 

But those panels don't last forever, and Pablo Ribeiro Dias wants to make sure they don't end up in a landfill. So he cofounded SolarCycle, a Texas-based startup that reclaims old solar panels so they can be turned into new ones. 

The company has raised $37 million so far and expects to process about 1 million panels a year at a new recycling and manufacturing plant. SolarCycle's customers include some of the largest renewable-energy companies including Ørsted and Sunrun.

"If we can use the same resources for longer, that means less resources are extracted from the Earth," Dias, who has two Ph.D.s and pioneered research on new ways to recycle solar panels, said. "That is one way for us to live sustainably."

Dias said he learned the value of materials from a young age growing up in Brazil, where throwaway culture isn't as prevalent as in the US. Dias researched e-waste recycling technology for cellphones and other electronics, which paved the way for his work on solar panels. 

SolarCycle says its technology can reclaim more than 95% of all the valuable materials in solar panels, including aluminum, glass, copper, silver, and silicon. These materials are sold back into the solar value chain. The hope is that by scaling a circular system, the demand for mining new metals in countries like Mexico, China, and Democratic Republic of Congo will drop. 

Plastics are a trickier material, Dias said, because the plastic used in solar panels is similar to rubber tires. Right now, it's not feasible to recycle that. 

The next stage for SolarCycle is opening a second recycling plant in Phoenix and establishing a research and development center. 

"We're in a great position to build a real circular economy, not just a fairy-tale one," Dias said.

When Amanda Hall founded Summit Nanotech in 2018, it was an all-or-nothing moment.

"One day, I woke up, had a bit of an existential crisis, said I want to leave the future better for my kids than it is today, and started this company," she told Business Insider.

After 20 years as a geophysicist in the oil, gas, and mining industry, Hall spotted a gap in the market for lithium extraction.

Lithium is used to make batteries in laptops, cellphones, and electric cars. It's crucial to the clean-energy transition. However, traditional lithium-extraction methods require vast amounts of land and water. Hall wanted to find a more sustainable way to meet the growing demand for the metal.

Summit Nanotech employs a method called direct lithium extraction, which uses less land and produces less waste than traditional extraction methods, Hall told BI, adding that there's a common misconception that cleantech is costly. In reality, she said, the reductions in energy use, water use, and waste management result in "a cheaper process that's also cleaner and more efficient."

The company opened a facility in Chile to scale up its direct-lithium-extraction technology following a pilot program in 2022. For Hall, it was important to have "boots on the ground" and establish good relationships with Indigenous communities in Chile, she said.

Hall also worked with the Chilean government to introduce new standards for lithium extraction in the country. The legislation, announced in April, implements higher standards for things such as water and energy preservation.

Most of the materials used by major fashion brands pose a problem for the environment: They're made from fossil fuels. 

NFW, an alternative-materials manufacturer led by its founder, Luke Haverhals, is working to solve this problem by making plant-based leather, rubber, and yarn that are free from animals, petrochemicals, and plastics. 

There are many startups in this "next-gen" materials space. Part of what sets NFW apart, Haverhals said, is: "You have to perform cost competitively and be able to scale not just to millions but billions of square feet of materials in order to be relevant." 

Haverhals says NFW is set up to scale. The company has raised $160 million so far and its plant-based leather is already used in Stella McCartney handbags, Allbirds sneakers, and Bellroy wallets. BMW's venture-capital unit invested in NFW in July and said the startup's alternative leather was the only one in that market that's scalable, durable, and cost-competitive while having a low carbon footprint.

Haverhals grew up on a farm in Iowa and taught chemistry at Bradley University and the US Naval Academy before founding NFW in 2015. NFW's approach, he told Business Insider, involves taking the byproducts of what farmers grow at a massive scale, such as rice husks, coconut fiber, and cork, and feeding them into machines that already make textiles.

"NFW isn't remaking textile mills or car-manufacturing facilities," Haverhals said. "We want to bring our technology into those factories."

NFW has tested its material "recipes" on machines at its commercial factory in Peoria, Illinois, The next step is to prove the technology can work on a larger scale. The startup needs to raise tens of millions of dollars to fund the next phase of development, which Haverhals acknowledged would be challenging. He said investors were wary of material innovation after another startup earlier this year paused production of its mushroom-based leather.

Haverhals remains a firm believer that NFW has an edge over the competition for all the reasons BMW cited in its endorsement.

"Impact is scale; scale is impact," Haverhals said. "And if we don't want to use synthetic materials, then we need to grow the future."

Scientists have tried for decades to harness the power of nuclear fusion, the same process that powers the sun and the stars. Fusion could provide nearly limitless energy without greenhouse-gas emissions or long-lived radioactive waste. 

Some experts have predicted fusion won't be a viable power source for decades. But David Kirtley and his team at Helion Energy are confident the timeline is much closer.  

In May, Microsoft agreed to buy 50 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power about 40,000 homes, from a fusion power plant being developed by Helion. The startup's plant is expected to come online by 2028. In October, Helion announced plans to build a 500-megawatt power plant at a steel plant owned by Nucor, America's biggest steel supplier and recycler. The companies said the operation could start as early as 2030.

These fusion facilities would mark the dawn of a new era of energy. 

Kirtley, a nuclear and aerospace engineer, wasn't always convinced that humans could harness fusion for electricity during his lifetime. At one point, he left the field and worked on advanced rockets instead. But as fusion systems became smaller and more energy efficient through modern electronics and fiber optics, Kirtley saw a path forward. He helped build those fusion systems at MSNW, a research company backed by NASA and the US Department of Energy. That work was spun off into Helion in 2013. 

All six of Helion's fusion prototypes have set records for their energy output and the temperature at which they operate, recently exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius — an ideal threshold for a power plant. The seventh prototype, expected to be completed this year, is set to be the first to convert fusion energy into electricity, Kirtley said. 

He told Business Insider that his work can be traced back to a childhood experience in Bermuda, when his father was stationed there while serving in the Navy. Kirtley could see the space shuttle launch from Cape Canaveral. 

"I just felt the majesty of what people and technology can do," Kirtley said. "As I grew older, I also reflected on the disparities in Bermuda, and how our standard of living is directly tied to access to electricity. So I got into college thinking, 'Man, we need to solve these energy problems.'"

Sandeep Nijhawan is an entrepreneur and investor who's currently focused on creating more sustainable steelmaking processes. The industry is responsible for up to 10% of annual global greenhouse-gas emissions. 

Electra, founded in 2020, has developed a way to purify iron ore otherwise deemed too contaminated to use for steelmaking, Nijhawan said. This adds to the sector's circularity and reduces the need to mine for high-grade materials, he said. 

Traditionally, iron ore is smelted at high temperatures and converted to steel. Electra's technology uses cooler temperatures to refine iron ore, making it more compatible with intermittent renewable energy, Nijhawan said. Electra is left with the extracted impurities, often minerals and iron plates. The latter can be made into steel using electric furnaces. 

The company has raised $85 million from investors, including Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Nijhawan said Electra plans to produce iron for green steel at a pilot scale by the end of the year.

Nijhawan described Electra as a continuation of his previous venture, Staq Energy, an energy-storage company he launched in 2016 to accelerate the adoption of renewables. "Instead of storing renewable energy in the form of chemical storage, we're using it to produce clean iron, which is the key constraint to decarbonize steel," he said. 

The founder has always had the "entrepreneurial bug," he said, but he was inspired to focus on solutions to the climate crisis after a conversation with his children where he promised them he would try to make a positive impact on the environment.

Kimiko Hirata's work as an activist has led to the cancellation of 17 planned coal power plants in Japan.

After the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, the Japanese government shut down many of its nuclear-power facilities and turned to coal power to provide the country's energy instead. 

At the time, Hirata, who holds a Ph.D. in social sciences from Waseda University, worked on environmental policy at the Japanese nonprofit Kiko Network. She knew that the expansion of coal power would lead to an increase in greenhouse-gas emissions and said she was wary that there were "no voices on the ground" to fight the decision.

Hirata told Business Insider that she felt nongovernmental organizations and civil society in Japan were too small to stop the government and big industry and that public awareness of the climate impact of coal power was low. "The government advertised that the latest coal power is clean, so people believed that this is clean and there's no harm," she said. For instance, the Japanese government has promoted ammonia cofiring, where ammonia is blended with coal, as "clean" despite warnings that the method does little to affect overall greenhouse-gas emissions.

Hirata wanted to change that, so she started to make connections at the community level.

"I tried several different approaches to get the support, talking about air pollution, or economic impacts, or climate change," Hirata said. She said it was "trial and error" at first. Gradually, the campaign was picked up by local people, and the media started to cover the story, which Hirata said was a "game changer."

Hirata said that while she "planted the seeds" for the campaign, "the success was made by local people's voice and power." 

Today, Hirata runs Climate Integrate, a think tank, because she wants to increase climate expertise in Japan. She's also running a new campaign based around shareholder activism, a type of activism that targets fossil-fuel financers.

Mia Mottley became Barbados' first woman prime minister in 2018. The politician and lawyer broke political glass ceilings earlier in her career, as the leader of the Barbados Labour Party and as attorney general. 

Mottley has made a name for herself by calling out wealthy nations, and the global financial system as a whole, for failing to support poorer countries. She spearheaded the Bridgetown Initiative, a climate-action plan named after Barbados' capital city, which aims to restructure finance for disaster-stricken nations. She believes tackling the climate crisis through the global economic system will help to "make meaningful progress."

Barbados is one of the Caribbean countries most vulnerable to more powerful hurricanes and rising sea levels, which lead to other issues such as flooding and coastal erosion. The politician has long called for more collaboration between public and private investors.

"Let's take hotels that are on beaches," Mottley told the World Economic Forum. "If coastal erosion is bad, their revenue is going to be compromised."

She worked with the International Monetary Fund and creditors to give Barbados more flexibility with debt payments after a natural disaster. The country also struck a deal with The Nature Conservancy to redirect part of its sovereign debt service toward ocean conservation.

In the small Nigerian village where Samuel Onuigbo grew up, he and his neighbors would draw drinking water from six springs, and there were gullies where he and his friends from primary school would go to pick snails and chase rabbits. 

When Onuigbo returned to his village after finishing his college studies and a year of national service, he discovered that five of the springs had run dry and erosion had made many of the gullies in which he had once played too dangerous for people to enter. 

Those experiences made Onuigbo realize how much the climate crisis was hurting his country. As a member of the House of Representatives of Nigeria, Onuigbo sponsored a climate bill that was signed into law in 2021. 

The law requires the government to draw up plans on how to deal with the climate crisis and establish a carbon budget. The law also set up funding for dealing with emerging climate hazards and required many businesses to meet annual emissions-reduction targets. 

Onuigbo said before the law was passed, government directors in various agencies often tried to tackle the problem piecemeal. "They preferred working in silos, not reporting to anybody, not being coordinated. And that, for me, is absolutely unproductive," he said. Now, Onuigbo said, the president appoints people to oversee these efforts. That means there's greater accountability. 

Beyond the legal framework, Onuigbo, who left the Nigerian House of Representatives in June after eight years, said the bill helped bring everyday Nigerians' attention to the effects of the climate crisis on the country. "You are getting conversations on climate change from different angles within the nation," he said. 

Onuigbo is currently a board member and the chairman of the committee on security, special interventions, and climate change of the North East Development Commission. 

Matt Petersen has been an environmental leader for three decades. 

The Modesto, California, native spent the first part of his career advocating for nuclear demilitarization and pioneering the green-building movement before becoming Los Angeles' first chief sustainability officer in 2013. He also created Climate Mayors, a coalition of 250 US mayors fighting the climate crisis.

For the past six years, Petersen has led the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, or LACI, a nonprofit that helps startups scale their low-carbon transportation and energy technologies in communities exposed to high levels of pollution. 

Petersen has expanded LACI's work beyond just a startup incubator. The nonprofit launched the Transportation Electrification Partnership in May 2018, which pools public and private money and invests it in pilot programs aimed at cleaning up LA's busy ports, freeways, and local communities. The goal is to drive down greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollution from heavy-duty shipping trucks and personal cars by 2028, when LA is hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games. 

LACI startups are testing electric-vehicle car-sharing at public-housing developments in East LA and a zero-emissions delivery zone in Santa Monica. The nonprofit has also assembled funding for electric-truck charging stations at the Port of LA and Long Beach, where some 40% of the country's shipping containers arrive before dirty diesel-engine trucks drive the goods around the region. 

LACI is expanding its work into clean energy, releasing a road map in October focused on electrifying buildings and deploying smaller renewable-energy systems powered by solar, battery storage, and other technologies. LACI also has a workforce development program that trains about 300 people each year, including an all-female course on EV charging maintenance, Petersen said.

Petersen told Business Insider that he wants the green economy to be inclusive of all races, classes, and genders. Petersen worked with Habitat for Humanity, helping to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and he saw the barriers families faced to live in affordable, energy-efficient homes that didn't leave them with high utility bills and poor indoor-air quality. Petersen said he's also had many female mentors who instilled the importance of empowering women in the workforce.  

"Changing the composition of our startups to be more diverse was important to me so LACI better represents the economy and the population of Los Angeles," Petersen said.

In 2022, world leaders gathered in Egypt for the UN's annual climate summit. One of the most important outcomes of that event was the creation of a "loss and damage" fund — effectively a pot of money that poor, climate-vulnerable countries can tap into to pay for the damage caused by the climate crisis. Wealthy powers such as the US and European Union, which are historically responsible for the greenhouse-gas emissions warming the planet, are expected to contribute. 

Maisa Rojas, Chile's environment minister, led those negotiations with Jennifer Morgan, Germany's special envoy for the climate crisis.

Rojas told Business Insider it was an incredible privilege to have been asked by Egyptian officials to handle the talks. But at the outset, there was no guarantee of success. It wasn't clear whether loss and damage would be on the agenda at all, given the decades of opposition from rich countries. After that hurdle, days of negotiations ensued over what a deal would look like. 

"The momentum was there," Rojas said, adding that a coalition of small island states and developing countries known as the Group of 77 and China was united in the cause. "Very late in the negotiations, the EU decided to say yes to a fund, and then we'd sort out the details afterward. That was a very exciting moment."

A year later, those details are starting to take shape in a proposal that could be adopted during the UN climate summit in Dubai, which starts in November. Many issues remain contentious, such as which countries are eligible for the funds, which have to contribute money, and how much. 

A UN-commissioned report said that based on recent climate-fueled disasters, the future costs of loss and damage could be as much as $150 billion to $300 billion by 2030 based.

"In a way, we are admitting that we as humanity have failed to address climate change," Rojas said. "Now there are irreversible losses that need to be addressed. This fund can help the most vulnerable and the most affected."

Rojas, who holds a Ph.D. in atmospheric physics, also wants to ensure the most vulnerable populations in Chile benefit from the green transformation the country is undergoing, she said. Rojas took office in March 2022 under President Gabriel Boric and is responsible for implementing a new climate law that requires Chile to become carbon-neutral by 2050.

Before holding political office, Rojas was the director of the Center for Climate and Resilience Research at the Universidad de Chile and a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports.

Chile is known as a trailblazer in the sustainable-bond market. As of this year, the country has $43.5 billion in public debt — more than a third of its total debt — tied to achieving its climate and social goals.

The architect of the program is Patricio Sepúlveda. His office developed financial frameworks that paved the way for Chile in 2019 to become the first country in the Americas to issue a green bond, creating a model for other countries in the region. The bond funds projects to electrify public transportation, expand renewable energy, and make buildings more energy efficient. 

"We need to have more sustainable growth," Sepúlveda told Business Insider. "We can grow our economy without forgetting about protecting the environment." 

Since then, Sepúlveda has expanded Chile's bond program for sustainable development. In 2022, Chile became the first country in the world to issue a sustainability-linked bond, or SLB. Unlike green or social bonds that are tied to specific projects, SLBs are attached to achieving longer-term targets. If those targets aren't met, Chile will face financial penalties.

Chile aims to peak its greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025 and achieve net-zero emissions by midcentury. That goal is enshrined in the country's climate law published last year. Chile also wants 60% of its electricity to come from renewable energy by 2032 — compared to 27% in 2021. On the issue of gender equality, the country is pushing for women to represent 40% of corporate board directors by 2031. Women currently only make up about 13% of board positions.

Sepúlveda said SLBs are a powerful way to ensure Chile continues making progress toward its sustainability goals, regardless of who's in charge politically. He added that the next goal is to incorporate biodiversity goals into Chile's SLBs, because protecting forests and oceans is key to solving climate change.

JQ Yuan works toward making buildings, infrastructure, and communities resilient against natural disasters.

With more frequent extreme weather events predicted as a result of the climate crisis, Yuan said that it's vital that we're "building for life." 

"Sometimes it's not easy to sell that concept because when you have a building better and stronger, it always comes with a cost," Yuan said. But, he said, investing in resilience now could have a huge payoff in the future.

Yuan, who has a Ph.D. in structural engineering from the University of Kansas, led a study that found for every dollar spent by federal agencies on natural-hazard mitigation, $6 was saved. The study also found that adopting the latest building-code requirements saved $11 for every $1 invested. "The return on investment is huge," Yuan said. 

For Yuan, incentivizing the private sector to invest in provisions to mitigate against natural disasters is hugely important. He recently coauthored a road map outlining how to create "mutual benefit" for both the private sector and society when responding to extreme weather. Yuan is also working on the National Institute of Building Sciences' Lifeline Infrastructure Hub, which aims to create public-private partnerships at the community level to aid in disaster recovery.

Current building codes, Yuan said, are based on what has happened in the past and take the climate crisis into account. He said we needed to bring together the current science with engineering and "design for the future climate-change conditions."