For the first time in its 37-year history, the Goldman Environmental Prize has awarded all six of its annual prizes to women — a milestone for a distinction sometimes called the Green Nobel, honouring grassroots activists whose campaigns have stopped oil drilling, blocked mining projects, won landmark court rulings and protected endangered species across six continents.
The 2026 recipients are Iroro Tanshi of Nigeria, Borim Kim of South Korea, Sarah Finch of the United Kingdom, Theonila Roka Matbob of Papua New Guinea, Alannah Acaq Hurley of the United States and Yuvelis Morales Blanco of Colombia. Each receives $200,000 in prize money. The Goldman Prize has been awarded annually since Richard and Rhoda Goldman established it in 1989, selecting one winner from each of the world’s six primary geographic regions.
“The 2026 Prize winners are proof positive that courage, hard work, and hope go a long way toward creating meaningful progress,” said John Goldman, vice president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation.
Morales Blanco, 24, won for South and Central America after leading a campaign that stopped commercial fracking from taking hold in Colombia. She grew up in the Afro-Colombian fishing community of Puerto Wilches on the banks of the Magdalena River, and began organising after a 2018 oil spill forced dozens of families to relocate and killed thousands of animals. Her activism drew intimidation that temporarily forced her to leave her home, but it also elevated fracking as a central issue in Colombia’s 2022 elections and helped halt extraction projects. “We had nothing but the river — she was like a mother who took care of me,” she said.
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Borim Kim, the Asia winner, founded Youth 4 Climate Action and won a ruling from South Korea’s Constitutional Court that the government’s climate policy violated the constitutional rights of future generations — the first successful youth-led climate litigation on the continent.
Finch, representing Europe, spent more than a decade fighting oil drilling in southeastern England through the Weald Action Group. Her efforts produced the “Finch ruling” from the Supreme Court in June 2024, establishing that authorities must account for a fossil fuel project’s contribution to global climate change before granting extraction permits — a precedent with implications well beyond the English countryside.
Roka Matbob of Papua New Guinea won for the Islands and Island Nations region after leading a campaign that held Rio Tinto accountable for environmental and social damage caused by its Panguna copper mine — a mine that had been closed for 35 years following an armed uprising. Her work eventually compelled the world’s second-largest mining company to commit to addressing the devastation it left behind.
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Acaq Hurley, a member of the Yup’ik nation in Alaska, won for North America after joining 15 tribal nations in successfully defeating a proposed mega copper and gold mine that would have threatened Bristol Bay — home to the largest wild salmon runs on the planet and an ecosystem central to the survival of Indigenous communities that have depended on it for thousands of years.
Nigeria’s Tanshi, the Africa winner, took a different path. A bat biologist, she rediscovered the endangered short-tailed roundleaf bat, a species that had not been recorded for decades, and has since been working to protect its habitat at the Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary in Cross River State from the human-induced wildfires that threaten it.
The six winners share little in common beyond their gender and the determination that brought each of them into confrontation with forces — corporations, governments, industries — that had significant resources deployed against them. What the Goldman Foundation recognises each year is not celebrity environmentalism but the specific, often dangerous, frequently unglamorous work of people who intervened at the local level and changed outcomes that seemed fixed.