The Goldman Environmental Foundation in San Francisco has announced the recipients of the 2014 Goldman Environmental Prize, an annual award that recognizes grassroots environmental leaders from around the globe.

Celebrating its twenty-fifth year, the program honors emerging leaders from the world's six permanently inhabited continental regions who are working to protect the environment and their communities. With an individual cash prize of $150,000, the Goldman Prize is the largest award for grassroots environmental activism in the world.

This year's Goldman Prize recipients are Helen Slottje of the United States, an attorney who is using a clause in the New York state constitution to help towns pass local bans against hydraulic fracking; Suren Gazaryan, a zoologist and bat expert from Russia now living in Estonia who led multiple campaigns to expose governmental corruption and illegal exploitation of federally protected forestland along Russia's Black Sea coast; Ruth Buendia, a Peruvian who united the Asháninka people in a powerful campaign against large-scale dams that would have uprooted indigenous communities still recovering from a civil war in that country; Rudi Putra, a biologist from the Aceh region of Indonesia who is working to protect the habitat of the critically endangered Sumatran rhino by advocating for the dismantling of illegal palm oil plantations; Desmond D'Sa, a South African who has rallied Durban's diverse and disenfranchised communities to successfully shut down a toxic waste dump that was exposing residents to dangerous chemicals; and Ramesh Agrawal, an Indian who used a small Internet café to organize local villagers to stop one of the largest proposed coal mines in east-central state of Chhattisgarh.