7 unsung green heroes of 2024 you might have missed

From world leaders to climate activists and even lawyers, the Euronews Green team has rounded up a list of individuals we believe deserve recognition for all their hard work and dedication to the green movement in 2024. 

This list features a climate youth leader who championed mental health by writing about eco-anxiety, a 77-year-old grandmother who has served jail time for action against Big Oil, as well as senior groups who have led – and won – landmark legal fights in the courts.

Incredibly, and by pure chance, our final top seven were all women.

Women remain less represented at climate decision tables

As an all-female team ourselves, we were delighted to see that our shortlist was all women. This is despite the fact that there are fewer women in climate leadership roles.

That is something the global movement SHE Changes Climate hopes to address – by supporting diplomats behind the scenes to appoint more women into leadership roles at the Conferences of the Parties (COPs), galvanising public support and opinion and helping women find their own platform and voice.   

“Women represent more than 50 per cent of the population, and yet we continue to be spoken for,” says Bianca Pitt, co-founder of SHE Changes Climate. 

“When you look at the major climate negotiations, you see rows of suits removed from the lived experience of women experiencing the impacts of climate change. Enough is enough. Women must be represented in climate negotiations.”

This leads us nicely to our selection of seven unsung green heroes of 2024, who against the odds, are championing a liveable planet in their own ways. Drumroll, please…

Claudia Sheinbaum

For being the first climate scientist to become President

The new president of Mexico made headlines when she was elected in early June 2024. Not only was Claudia Sheinbaum the country’s first female president, but she was also the world’s first world leader to have an impressive background in climate science. 

For an oil-rich nation that’s already experiencing climate-related extreme weather, that’s quite a feat.

As a former academic, before taking on Mexico’s top political office, Sheinbaum had been a contributor to two major reports for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). During her time as mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum successfully introduced electric buses and covered the capital’s main food market with solar panels – and pushed forth green policies. 

While there are concerns, as Euronews Green has previously reported, that she may not have pushed the green agenda as much as she could have within her first months in office, the political leader has committed to a goal of 45 per cent clean energy by 2030. 

Sheinbaum has a six-year term to develop her “ambitious” energy transition agenda, which includes closing oil refineries and turning the state-run oil and gas company into an electricity provider that uses renewable sources, such as geothermal energy. 

Of course, what really helps shape political will is when we are faced with the undeniable facts of our situation, which is where our next unsung climate hero comes in…

Friederike Otto

For continuing to bang the drum on climate-related extreme weather

Climatologist Friederike Otto knows a thing or two about extreme weather. As a senior lecturer at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London, she focuses on droughts, heat waves and storms and tracks whether these events are made more likely or intense due to climate change, also known as ‘climate change attribution’ events.

With this expertise, German-born Otto co-leads the World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international effort to analyse and communicate the possible influence of climate change on extreme weather events. She also previously contributed to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report alongside other crucial climate science publications. Plus, she authored her own popular science book, ‘Angry Weather’. 

Definitely an unsung hero in our eyes, Euronews Green regularly reaches out to Otto for comments on extreme weather events. In 2024, this included catastrophic floods in Spain, record rainfall in Dubai, and most recently, the cyclone in the French Indian Ocean territory of Mayotte.

Bringing the human face to our weather systems, Otto regularly reminds us that it’s often victims of poverty who become victims of climate change.

Speaking of which, for every victim, there needs to be a criminal, which leads us to the vital work of our next two heroes…

Tessa Khan and Laura Clarke

For bringing greenwashing and climate justice cases to court

We couldn’t pick just one, so two UK-based individuals are unsung heroes for their efforts in influencing legislation that will have a major impact on future generations.

First up is Tessa Khan, an international climate change lawyer and the founder of Uplift, an organisation that supports a fair transition away from oil and gas production in the UK. 

Tessa’s organisation filed a legal challenge (alongside a separate one from Greenpeace) to the government’s decision to allow energy companies Equinor and Ithaca Energy to develop huge untapped oil and gas fields in the North Sea, Rosebank and Jackdaw. In this landmark court case due to be decided in January 2025, Uplift stated that the projects don’t take into account the full extent of the environmental damage they will do. Khan champions ordinary people holding world governments accountable, as well as the right to protest, which is being clamped down on in the UK. 

Then there’s Laura Clarke, who, as CEO of ClientEarth, continues to use the law to combat misleading claims from international companies that undermine climate action. 

Most recently, the not-for-profit organisation had a landmark settlement that prevents companies in Poland from marketing chunks of unsustainable, polluting coal as ‘eco-pea’ coal.

Also in 2024, ClientEarth successfully supported campaigners in the Netherlands to bring a challenge to the major airline KLM for greenwashing and to top asset management firm BlackRock for misnaming some of its investment funds as sustainable – despite them including major fossil fuel companies.

Challenging big companies, however, sure does take its toll, which our next unsung green hero certainly knows something about…

Tori Tsui

For publishing the blueprint book for eco-anxiety

Climate activist Tori Tsui is a young climate activist originally from Hong Kong and now based in the UK. For several years now Tsui has been using her popular online platform to talk about climate-related issues, and even sailed across the Atlantic to reach Chile for COP25.

Tsui has been advocating for good mental health with her recently published book ‘It’s Not Just You’. This highlights the issue of eco-anxiety – extreme worry about current and future harm to the environment caused by human activity and climate change. For all climate campaigners and particularly younger generations, eco-anxiety is a very real issue that prevents our ability to take action.

Greta Thunberg said that the world is “in desperate need” of Tsui’s book: “We are burned out people on a burned out planet, and we have to talk about mental health and its connections with the planetary emergency.”

Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh

For bringing the biggest case in history to the International Court of Justice (ICJ)

As the legal counsel for the Pacific island nation Vanuatu, Margaretha Wewerinke-Singh has made history by representing the largest-ever case before the UN world court, which has involved more than 100 countries and organisations, including the US, China, and OPEC.

Wewerinke-Singh is a lecturer in Environmental Law at the University of the South Pacific (USP) School of Law, and she has focused her career on the role of human rights in sustainable development law and governance, working with both policymakers and leading non-governmental organisations, including the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Greenpeace and Oxfam.

As Euronews Green has frequently reported this year, the goal of this ICJ hearing is to create a framework of legal accountability for climate action: it could help vulnerable nations fight the devastating impact of global warming. While the court’s advisory opinion – expected in 2025 – won’t be able to force wealthy nations into action directly, it could serve as the basis for other legal actions, including domestic lawsuits.

Not to be forgotten in this landmark case, however, are the 27 young law students, led by Solomon Yeo, who were studying at the USP when they first came up with the idea to change international law at the highest level. 

From the youngest unsung heroes to the more senior, next, we bring you…

Gaie Delap

For facing prison for her climate activism despite her wise years

Most 77-year-old pensioners would be happy to sit on their laurels. But one UK-based retired teacher, Gaie Delap, felt her “heart was breaking” for the future of her six grandchildren. 

That’s why she decided to join the British environmental activist group Just Stop Oil, and before too long was volunteering to scale up a gantry on the M25, a major road that encircles most of Greater London. Delap was arrested alongside 11 other protesters, but at 76, was the most senior of the activists by a few decades. 

While Delap apologised for her action in court, not realising that she was in contempt of court for causing significant tailbacks, she told the High Court judge that the climate emergency “has not been taken seriously enough.”

The campaigner was sentenced to 20 months in jail but was released after three months under a home detention curfew. However, Delap was recalled to prison just before Christmas because the tagging system outsourced by the UK’s Ministry of Justice cannot find an electronic tag that fits her as her wrists are too small, and she cannot have it fitted to her ankle due to a medical condition, despite already abiding by a curfew without a tag while waiting 18 months for her case to come to trial.

If Delap does need to return to prison, you can do a good Christmas deed by writing to her and other activists who have been imprisoned for non-violent/peaceful protest through the group Rebels in Prison.

From one grandmother’s individual climate action – it’s time to acknowledge the 2,500-strong group of Swiss grandmothers who made an impact in 2024…

KlimaSeniorinnen

For fighting – and winning – a landmark climate case in Europe

We could have named dozens of other groups who worked tirelessly for green issues in 2924, but what made these Swiss senior citizens remarkable was the fact they won a case that others before them – including six young people from Portugal and a former French mayor – had tried and failed to do before.

KlimaSeniorinnen – or the Swiss Elders for Climate Protection – won a landmark climate case at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). 

In a historic decision, 16 judges agreed with the group that the Swiss government was failing to take enough action on the impact of climate change on their health and that its policies were ‘clearly inadequate’ to keep below the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5C.

Extraordinarily, members of this large Swiss association have an average age of 73, so they are acting for future generations. 

While KlimaSeniorinnen is our only official collective on this list, they also represent all other groups that work together for the climate. Because as we all know – tackling climate change is never a solo task. Green issues are everybody’s business.