The San Francisco-based Goldman Environmental Foundation has announced the recipients of the 2022 Goldman Environmental Prizes, which honors grassroots environmental activists from each of the world’s six inhabited continental regions.

This year’s honorees include Nalleli Cobo (United States), who, at the age of 19, led a community coalition to permanently shut down a toxic oil-drilling site in her community in 2020 and got in the Los Angeles City Council and Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to ban new oil exploration and phase out existing sites; Alex Lucitante and Alexandra Narvaez (Ecuador), who spearheaded an Indigenous movement to protect their people’s ancestral territory from gold mining, which resulted in the country’s courts canceling 52 illegal gold mining concessions in 2018; and Marjan Minnesma (the Netherlands), who in 2019 won a ruling against the Dutch government, requiring it to enact specific preventive measures against climate change.

The other winners are Niwat Roykaew (Thailand), whose advocacy efforts resulted in the termination of the China-led Upper Mekong River rapids blasting project, which would have destroyed 248 miles of the river and the rich biodiversity of its fisheries, tributaries, wetlands, and floodplains; Julien Vincent (Australia), who led a successful grassroots campaign to defund coal in Australia, a major coal exporter, and secured commitments from the nation’s four largest banks to end funding for coal projects by 2030; and environmental lawyer Chima Williams (Nigeria), whose work to hold Royal Dutch Shell accountable for the environmental damage caused by oil spills in two Nigerian communities led to a 2021 ruling by the Court of Appeal of the Hague against both Royal Dutch Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary and the parent company.

“While the many challenges before us can feel daunting, and at times make us lose faith, these seven leaders give us a reason for hope and remind us what can be accomplished in the face of adversity,” said Goldman Environmental Foundation vice president Jennifer Goldman Wallis. “The prize winners show us that nature has the amazing capability to regenerate if given the opportunity. Let us all feel inspired to channel their victories into regenerating our own spirit and act to protect our planet for future generations.”

(Photo credit: Goldman Environmental Prize)