SAN FRANCISCO — Six women from Nigeria, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Papua New Guinea, the United States and Colombia won the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize, a major global honor for grassroots environmental leadership, April 20, 2026. Their victories show how community campaigns can change law, force corporate accountability and protect threatened ecosystems, even as land and environmental defenders continue to face deadly risks worldwide.
Environmental defenders honored for grassroots victories
The Goldman Environmental Foundation named 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 as the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize winners. The cohort is notable not only for the scope of its wins, but also because all six honorees are women.
Tanshi led community wildfire prevention work to protect Nigeria’s Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary and the endangered short-tailed roundleaf bat. Kim helped secure a youth-led constitutional climate victory in South Korea. Finch’s campaign helped produce a landmark United Kingdom Supreme Court ruling requiring decision-makers to consider downstream climate impacts from fossil fuel projects.
Matbob pushed Rio Tinto to address environmental and social damage tied to the long-dormant Panguna mine in Papua New Guinea. Hurley helped unite tribal nations and allies against the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay region. Morales Blanco helped stop pilot fracking projects in Colombia’s Puerto Wilches area and defend the Magdalena River.
Deadly risks still shadow environmental defenders
The honors come against a stark global backdrop. Global Witness documented 146 killings and long-term disappearances of land and environmental defenders in 2024 and said the figure is likely an underestimate. Its latest global findings on attacks against defenders said the total number of documented killings and disappearances since 2012 reached 2,253.
Latin America remained the deadliest region, with Colombia recording the highest number of cases for the third consecutive year. The pattern shows that public recognition and international awards do not erase the risks faced by people who challenge mining, logging, agribusiness, fossil fuel projects and other powerful interests.
The United Nations Environment Programme says environmental defenders face assaults, murders, intimidation and criminalization while working to protect land, water, air, forests and communities. The agency has called for stronger protection, accountability and responsible natural resource management.
Older reporting shows the danger did not emerge overnight
The threat has built over years. In 2021, Reuters reported that Colombia recorded 65 killings of environmental defenders in 2020, nearly one-third of the worldwide total that year, as armed groups and criminal networks contested rural areas after the country’s peace deal.
In 2022, The Guardian reported that at least 1,733 land and environmental defenders were murdered between 2012 and 2021, with Brazil, Colombia, the Philippines, Mexico and Honduras among the deadliest countries. By 2024, Reuters reported that Colombia was again the deadliest country for environmentalists in 2023, when 79 were killed.
That continuity matters. The 2026 Goldman winners are being honored for concrete victories, but their work fits into a longer struggle in which many defenders face surveillance, threats, lawsuits, forced displacement and violence before their campaigns ever reach international attention.
Why protection matters as much as praise
Forced disappearance has become part of that wider pattern. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights cited experts warning that disappearances of people defending land, natural resources and the environment are a growing trend fueled by impunity, often in settings marked by violence, repression, marginalization and climate pressure.
Policy gaps are also part of the problem. The World Resources Institute argues that frontline environmental defenders remain overlooked in climate policies even though they help prevent deforestation, protect ecosystems and enforce environmental safeguards that governments and institutions often rely on.
The Goldman Prize gives this year’s winners a powerful platform. The harder test is whether governments, companies and international institutions turn that attention into protection, investigations, legal support and funding for the communities doing the riskiest work. Without that, the world will continue celebrating environmental defenders after victories while failing too many of them before the next threat arrives.
