Record-shattering heat, billion-dollar storms and rising seas are unfolding as political pushback, misinformation and wavering international agreements threaten to stall climate progress. Yet across sectors and continents, a new climate economy is advancing anyway—fueled by record clean energy investment, China's green-tech boom and a worldwide surge in renewable power from advanced to emerging economies. In a moment of fading political consensus, but accelerating real-world change, decisive leadership matters more than ever.

Now in its second year, the Forbes Sustainability Leaders list honors 50 people setting the pace for a just, sustainable economy and defining what climate leadership looks like today. From harnessing AI while meeting soaring energy demands to restoring ecosystems and reshaping global finance, they are not simply working to recover what’s been lost; they are charting the next phase of the transition.

Chosen with the guidance of judges — impact investor Laurene Powell Jobs, actor-activist Jane Fonda, investor and climate financier Tom Steyer, clean energy entrepreneur Jigar Shah, social impact founder Charlot Magayi and biotech CEO Ester Baiget —this year’s honorees prove how breakthrough ideas and targeted investment are continuing to deliver measurable progress. As Steyer puts it, “When the sustainable choice is also the smart choice, the future becomes obvious. What’s left is the courage to deliver it.”

The list—presented alphabetically, not ranked—celebrates those whose recent achievements prove that meaningful climate progress is happening now and aims to inspire the cross-sector collaboration it will take to scale it.

Many carbon removal startups are struggling to raise funds to commercially deploy their technology due to high costs, but Mati Carbon is bucking the trend. The company, founded by Indian-born entrepreneur Shantanu Agarwal, proposes spreading finely crushed basalt over farmland. When mixed with rainwater, basalt dissolves into chemicals including magnesium, silicon and calcium that react with carbon from the atmosphere to form bicarbonate, which will eventually be washed into the sea through rivers and streams, where it will remain for thousands of years. The idea won the $50-million grand prize of the XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition in April 2025, beating 1,300 teams from 88 countries. Judges found that this method is cost-effective, scalable and would provide farmers in the Global South with additional revenue from the sale of carbon credits to companies such as Shopify, Stripe and H&M. (For more, see “This Startup Is Scaling Up A Low-Tech Way To Pull Massive Amounts Of Carbon From The Air.”)

In 2016, Laurene Allen discovered an unsettling truth about her town's drinking water in Merrimack, New Hampshire: Its levels of PFAS (or "forever chemicals") far exceeded safe limits. Many of her neighbors developed fatal illnesses and other disorders later linked to the contamination. Driven to action, Allen cofounded a local community organization and the National PFAS Contamination Coalition, a network of grassroots activists fighting industrial PFAS polluters across the country. As the direct result of Allen's lobbying—testifying at community hearings, providing public comment and providing evidence for a class action lawsuit against Saint-Gobain for its neglect—the Merrimack factory was shut down in May 2024. Under her leadership, the Biden administration established the first federal PFAS drinking water standard in 2024.

John Amos founded SkyTruth in 2001, a conservation technology nonprofit that uses satellite imagery to track global polluters such as the oil, gas, shipping and fishing industries. In 2023, SkyTruth launched Project Cerulean, which relies on AI to automatically scan satellite images to detect oil slicks at sea and identify who's responsible by comparing vessel movements to oil slick locations. In 2017, the nonprofit launched Global Fishing Watch (GFW), which uses satellite-collected ship tracking data and AI to detect and map all of the commercial fishing activity in the ocean. GFW now has operations in 30 countries with over 120 staff members.

Anousheh Ansari is the CEO of XPRIZE Foundation, a nonprofit that runs competitions with $500 million in prizes designed to spur new ideas on how to tackle environmental challenges. Under her leadership, the Elon Musk-backed foundation awarded the $100 million Carbon Removal prize in April 2025, the largest incentive competition in climate tech history with 1,300 teams across 80 countries. In 2024, she oversaw the launch of the Water Scarcity prize, a $119-million global competition to address the growing threat of water scarcity. Ansari, who lives in Dallas, was the first Iranian to go to space. "Seeing Earth from space forever changed my perspective—our planet appeared fragile, interconnected and profoundly worth protecting. It was a call to action I couldn't ignore," she told Forbes.

Sir David Attenborough is more than just his charismatic British broadcasting voice. The internationally acclaimed naturalist and filmmaker is best known for his six decades producing wildlife documentaries for the BBC, but at 99 years old, Attenborough has continued to educate millions about climate change and biodiversity through filmmaking. His latest film, Ocean with David Attenborough, was released in May 2025 just before the United Nations Ocean Conference, showcasing the wonder of underwater habitats while exposing how destructive fishing practices are decimating marine life. The film's groundbreaking footage of bottom-trawling, a harmful industrial fishing practice, has been viewed online more than 20 million times. "This film is a call to wake up," he says in the documentary. "If we save the sea, we save our world."

In June 2025, Barbara 'Wáahlaal Gíidaak Blake co-led a global effort of 1,000 scientists to demand an industrial fishing pause in the Central Arctic Ocean, a 1.1-million-square-mile ecosystem around the North Pole, to protect vital arctic marine resources. Along with her work at the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, she is a board director of the for-profit Sealaska, which has helped regenerative and Indigenous-led seafood companies prepare more than $500 million of sustainably sourced seafood for markets each year. 'Wáahlaal Gíidaak, who is of Haida, Tlingit and Ahtna Athabascan descent and belongs to the Káat nay-st/Yahkw Jáanaas (Shark House/Middle Town People) Clan, has integrated ancestral Indigenous perspectives into her work by helping initiate the Indigenous Law of the Sea—a collaborative effort to adjust marine policy to incorporate Indigenous knowledge and values.

Karen Blanks Ellis leads FedEx's global sustainability strategy to reach carbon-neutral operations by 2040—a challenging task for a $53-billion company that makes 17 million shipments a day across 220 countries. To slash tailpipe emissions, FedEx is piloting electric vehicles on six continents. In 2024, FedEx achieved a 6.1% year-over-year decrease in direct emissions, in part thanks to aircraft upgrades and fuel reduction efforts that have saved the company $400 million in fuel costs. "That kind of reduction—particularly when driven by greater efficiencies in the notoriously challenging-to-decarbonize aviation part of our business—is something I am incredibly proud of," Ellis told Forbes.

CEO Estelle Brachlianoff has led environmental-services company Veolia to become a leader in energy, waste and water services across 56 countries with $48 billion in revenue in the year ending in June 2025. This year, the company opened its largest removal plant for PFAS ("forever chemicals") in Delaware, thanks to a new technology it developed to destroy certain PFAS compounds. The facility now serves 30 million gallons of water to 100,000 people each day. Other recent projects include a solar-powered water desalination facility in the United Arab Emirates, the world's first large-scale water reclamation facility in Brazil, and cleaning the Seine River before the 2024 Summer Olympics. Before Brachlianoff became CEO in 2022, Veolia's North America subsidiary faced a number of controversies, including its alleged contributions to the Flint water crisis and its alleged neglect of a former fracking project in West Virginia, and its Colombia subsidiary more recently was accused of toxic contamination of water resources. Veolia told Forbes these cases "reflect the complex and changing nature of our work" and asserted the company "acted properly."

In the two years since Vanessa Butani became Head of Global Sustainability at Volvo, the company has increased its electric car sales by more than half and decreased operational CO2 emissions per car by a quarter. To achieve a more circular supply chain, Volvo began working with Swedish steelmaker SSAB this year to use recycled steel for manufacturing. Volvo is also piloting bi-directional charging, which lets fully charged electric vehicles feed energy back into the grid. Volvo currently offers six electric models, with four more incoming. The biggest impact the car industry can have on climate, Butani says, is through electrification. (For more, see “Inside Volvo’s Efforts To Build Recycled Cars.”)

After Rhett Butler learned that a rainforest he visited with his family in Borneo would be cut down for wood pulp, he was inspired to start the nonprofit environmental news outlet Mongabay in 1999. It has grown to more than 1,000 correspondents across 80 countries, publishing investigations—from wildlife trafficking on land to unregulated fishing on the high seas—across seven languages for an annual readership of 50 million people. Last year, for instance, Mongabay's Latam team exposed 67 illegal air strips in the Peruvian Amazon that were used to smuggle drugs in and near protected Indigenous forest concessions, prompting government intervention. The investigation, which used AI and satellite imagery, was made possible in part by the newly launched Mongabay Data Studio: a way to leverage scientific and satellite data for reporting, such as tracking deforestation rates.

Since 2022, Jon Creyts has led the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a global nonprofit that works with businesses, policymakers, communities and startups to roll out market-based solutions that support the clean energy transition. Under Creyts' leadership, RMI has expanded projects in Nigeria and Southeast Asia; launched a collaboration with 20 U.S. states to quadruple heat pumps by 2030; and built a startup accelerator, Third Derivative, which has provided support to 268 climate tech startups. RMI has also helped design an electric rideshare and courier program in Delhi, India that has made over 800 million zero-carbon deliveries in the past three........

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