Book

Clover Moore, Lord Mayor of Sydney

As a child, she led The Scarlet Pimpernels of Neptune, taking her friends on walks to the national park. She gave her parents trees for their birthdays. “I’ve always been motivated by wonderful public spaces, planting grass, trees and bushes, and climate action.” Today, she is the longest-serving mayor of Sydney Australia, and she has planted 13,000 street trees, installed 4,000 solar panels on 38 of the city properties, changed the street lights to LEDs, and made Sydney the country’s first city government to be certified carbon neutral.

Sudeesa: Women-Led Community Conservation Cooperatives

Sudeesa includes women living in every village along the Sri Lanka coast: 15,000 of them, each growing 100 mangrove seedlings in her backyard. Mangroves sequester five times as much carbon dioxide as typical tropical trees (like those in the Amazon rain forest) but shrimp farmers and developers have stripped the island of mangroves, just as they have throughout the world. Sudeesa women plant, maintain and protect mangroves in Sri Lanka. Every year, they plant 1.5 million mangrove seedlings and report anyone who damages them.

Nelleke van der Puil, Vice President of Materials, LEGO

Imagine: your company is relying on you to invent sustainably-sourced plastics to replace the petroleum-based plastics they have relied on for 60 years to produce The Toy of the Century. They are staking their reputation (“best in the world”) on making their products 100% sustainable by 2030. Are you up for it? Nelleke van der Puil says, “It’s my dream job.” In 2018, LEGO introduced its first set made from sugar cane-based plastic. Now Nelleke is working on replacing 20 more kinds of plastic: all are on her To Do list.

Sheila Watt-Cloutier

“Inuits are the sentinels. We live at the top of the world, so we’re the first to witness the changes that are happening to our planet. The Arctic is its barometer. Everyone benefits from a frozen Arctic, but for us, it’s our birthright.” Climate change is causing the Arctic to warm twice as fast as the rest of the planet. The permafrost is melting, so buildings buckle in Sheila’s homeland; houses sink; runways crack; coastal banks are eroding. Snowmobiles have fallen through the thinning ice. “Indigenous wisdom is the medicine we seek to create a sustainable world,” Sheila acknowledges. She has won so many awards as an Inuit climate activist that the list fills three pages on Wikipedia, and her picture is on a Canadian postage stamp.