In its sixth annual campaign, the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) honours women who are making significant strides in restoring the planet and combating climate change. Despite the challenges posed by climate change, these women are leading efforts to find solutions to one of the world’s most pressing crises. The GLF’s list highlights innovators across diverse fields, including science, technology, art, public policy, sustainable business, environmental activism, journalism, litigation, climate finance, international climate negotiations, and grassroots ecosystem restoration.

“Hailing from across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, they take bold, science-backed action rooted in a deep commitment to all life on Earth. Facing challenges head on, they turn expertise into solutions in the form of collective environmental action,” the Forum said in the press release.

Remarkably, the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) unveils the annual list to celebrate Women’s History Month, March.

Meet These Remarkable Women

Danielle Khan Da Silva–The Artist

Meet Danielle Khan Da Silva – award-winning queer South Asian–Portuguese photographer, filmmaker, writer, intersectional conservationist and National Geographic Explorer.

Khan Da Silva’s photography and documentaries are captivating, not only because they’re professionally dazzling, but because she uses her art as a tool for collective liberation.

“For me, collective liberation is the vision and the goal,” Khan Da Silva says of her hope for all life on Earth.

Spreading her tool for change, Khan Da Silva founded Photographers Without Borders, an organization championing ethical storytelling. She has also founded a mentorship program called Reclaim Power and co-founded the Sumatran Wildlife Sanctuary.

“Rather than focusing solely on the loss of species or habitats, art can tell stories of resilience, regeneration, and hope – stories that empower people to take action towards a collective vision that benefits humans, wildlife and ecosystems alike.”

Ysa Calderón–The Bee Gaurdian

Meliponiculture may be a mouthful for many, but for Ysa Calderón, raising and breeding stingless bees is part of how she gives back to her community.

A Quechua descendant from the Lambayeque region in northern Peru, Calderón is a conservationist, chemical engineer, ecopreneur and stingless beekeeper who threads her Indigenous heritage and knowledge into everything she does.

In 2017, she founded the environmental enterprise Sumak Kawsay, which works to preserve and conserve native stingless bees and other pollinators, bolster local livelihoods and implement land restoration, doing applied research to recover their habitat.

Sumak Kawsay draws upon local Indigenous wisdom to conserve native pollinators and guide agroecological practices.

The organization also works with local women to earn income from honey production and agritourism. Some of the earnings from selling honey and panela sugars are invested into restoring their mountain ecosystem by reforesting the area with native plants.

“In rural areas like Salas, Lambayeque, women often face limited economic opportunities despite playing a crucial role in food production and environmental stewardship,” Calderón explains.

“We created a space where women could take leadership roles, gain financial independence and become key actors in conservation through our agritourism service. The Bee Honey Route, a transformative experience that invites us to connect with nature, discover the ancestral medicine of bees and empower rural and peasant women.”

Sonya Dewi–The Ecologist

Sonya Dewi has always been fascinated with how everything in life is connected through patterns and processes.

Now, she devotes her career to creating links between political infrastructure, conservation and ecosystem services as a landscape ecologist and the Director of Asia for World Agroforestry (ICRAF).

Based in Indonesia, Dewi has spent decades using remote sensing data to highlight how landscape governance can embrace mitigation for the climate crisis.

Her research focuses on tropical regions such as Brazil, India and Indonesia, where she analyzes how species and habitats coexist across ecosystems.

“I am drawn into questions surrounding how political economy drives spatial patterns and processes of land use and land cover change,” she says.

Dewi and her team have developed a software called Land Use Planning for Multiple Environmental Services (LUMENS), which brings together multiple stakeholders in sustainable landscape management planning, monitoring and evaluation.

This tool has since been adopted by the Indonesian government to mitigate the climate crisis through sustainable land management.

Rekia Foudel–The Fundraiser

When Rekia Foudel returned to her native country of Niger as an adult, she noticed something that would change her life forever.

She met climate entrepreneurs everywhere, but few of them were getting the funding they needed. After earning an MBA in the U.S. and spending five years working in corporate finance, Foudel found herself drawn back to her roots.

“What happens to founders after they’ve built their capacity?” she asked herself.

That question led her to found the Barka Fund – an impact investment group that caters to startups and small and medium enterprises across Sub-Saharan Africa.

“I’m putting my expertise to work by raising investment capital specifically targeted at climate entrepreneurs in Africa, particularly in regions like Niger and the Sahel that have immense potential but limited access to traditional funding channels,” says Foudel.

Foudel’s goal is to make climate action in Africa equitable and effective. The Barka Fund targets the ‘missing middle’ by securing capital for climate-focused enterprises that are too large for microfinance but too small for traditional investors.

It also supports early-stage climate entrepreneurs, with a special focus on women-led businesses and youth participation: at least 40 percent of Barka programs are women-led. In 2024, program participants raised over USD 1 million in funding.

Catherine Nakalembe–The Innovator

Growing up in Uganda, Catherine Nakalembe witnessed her mother and other farmers grapple with unpredictable weather patterns with no access to agricultural data.

Bent on making a difference, she devoted her PhD at the University of Maryland to exploring land cover change, agriculture and drought in northeastern Uganda – applying her knowledge to address challenges in her home country.

Now an assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s Department of Geographical Sciences, Nakalembe’s XylemLab focuses on utilizing remote sensing and machine learning to improve agricultural monitoring for food security and early warning of disasters in smallholder dominated landscapes.

She also serves as the Africa Director of NASA Harvest and the Agriculture and Food Security Thematic Lead for NASA SERVIR Applied Sciences.

Despite being based thousands of kilometers from home, Nakalembe hasn’t lost touch with her roots.

“Growing up in a large family in Uganda taught me the fundamental importance of caring for one another,” she reflects. “This experience instilled in me the value of putting people at the center, above titles, jobs or accolades. Anyone who spends more than five minutes talking with me can sense this authentic connection to my roots. It’s simply the Ugandan in me. This human-centered approach remains the cornerstone of how I address food security challenges.”

Célia Xakriabá–The Lawmaker

Not many 13-year-olds speak in front of Congress. Célia Xakriabá wasn’t like most 13-year-olds.

“The Indigenous movement shaped me,” explains Xakriabá, now a member of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies for the state of Minas Gerais.

Passionate about Indigenous education and activism, Xakriabá became the first Indigenous woman to join the State Department of Education of Minas Gerais in 2015. She didn’t stop there. In 2019, she began working as a parliamentary advisor in the National Congress in Brazil, and in 2022, she was elected as the first Indigenous federal deputy from her state.

Xakriabá advocates for the rights of nature and helps erase the “racism of absence” by ensuring representation for Brazil’s Indigenous Peoples.

“Why have people become so disconnected from the land and environmental issues?” she asks. “Many seem to think the environment is just about trees, but in reality, we are the environment.”

In 2023, she re-established the Parliamentary Front for the Defense of Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and was elected President of the Commission on the Amazon and Indigenous and Traditional Peoples. In doing so, she became the first Indigenous woman to chair a congressional commission.

At COP28, she launched the Planet Caucus, a campaign to defend Indigenous rights, the climate and biodiversity.

Subhra Bhattacharjee–The Leader

Subhra Bhattacharjee sees cynicism and despair as luxuries that humanity cannot afford right now.

A firm believer in human agency and the power of solidarity, she chooses to confront them head on, with a commitment to amplifying the voices of the most marginalized groups and creating spaces for them to lead. Driven by the understanding that the world’s most pressing challenges – climate change, deforestation, and social inequities–are inextricably interconnected, Bhattacharjee has dedicated her career to advancing policies and solutions that address these global crises by mobilizing a broad coalition of actors.

With forests as a critical line of defense against the climate crisis, Bhattacharjee, now director general of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC),  is going all in for forests and those who depend on them.

“Forests are not just ecosystems; they are homes, livelihoods, and a lifeline for millions of people. They are also one of our most powerful natural solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss. FSC is not just another organization, it is a platform for dialogue among economic, environmental and social interest groups around forests.”

Dayana Blanco–The Protector

Ever since she was a child in the Bolivian highlands, Dayana Blanco has always felt deeply rooted to her land and the waters of Uru Uru Lake – a Ramsar site home to dozens of bird species. But times have changed, and the lake’s waters have become tainted with pollution from mining, plastic waste and the climate crisis.

Blanco, an Indigenous Aymara woman, stepped in to safeguard her homeland. Today, she is a co-founder of the Uru Uru Team, a grassroots initiative dedicated to restoring Uru Uru Lake, by tenets of Aymara culture like Suma Qamaña – living well and in harmony with the planet.

“Suma Qamaña is something we need to recover in this epoch, where hazardous climate challenges seek to disconnect us from these tenets of respect and care for Mother Earth,” Blanco explains. To protect Uru Uru Lake and the livelihoods of seven Indigenous communities who depend on it, Blanco and her team are deploying their traditional knowledge to develop nature-based solutions.

Visit the Global Landscape Forum to see their full profiles.

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