Pope Francis is the 266th and current Pope of the Roman Catholic Church. He described environmental concerns as a great contemporary challenge and voiced opposition to deforestation. He believes that development should respect what Christians see as creation, and that exploiting the earth is sinful. On 18 June 2015, Pope Francis issued a papal encyclical called Laudato si' on climate change, care for the environment, and sustainable development. The encyclical sets apart the basic human needs and appetites. Although he asks for the use of renewable energy instead of conventional fuels, he thinks that it would not be enough unless society turns down the unlimited appetites of consumerism. 

Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores was a Honduran environmental activist and indigenous leader of her people. She won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015, for a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder Desarrollos Energéticos, S.A. (also known as DESA) to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam at the Rio Gualcarque. During the campaign against the dam on the Gualcarque River, Cáceres and other organizers were frequently intimidated by the military. She was assassinated in her home, at the age of 44, on March 3, 2016 by armed intruders, after years of threats against her life.

Over ten years ago, Jintana KaewKao, a small town mother from the Prachuab Khirikhan province of Thailand, found herself embroiled in a vicious crusade against the Union Power Development Company, which bought coastal land under the pretense of building a tourist resort, while planning to cut down 10,000 coconut trees to construct a coal power plant. Although KaewKao “didn’t quite understand climate change until [she] started fighting against the construction of the factory,” she bravely stepped up to take on a leadership role in her community and became a coal activist. Fueled by a passion for the cultural heritage of her beautiful coastal village, KaewKao has risked her life and suffered imprisonment on several occasions to take a stance against powerful corporate and governmental leaders. 

James Hansen is an American adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. From 1981 to 2013, he was the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He is best known for his research in climatology, his 1988 Congressional testimony on climate change that helped raise broad awareness of global warming, and his advocacy of action to avoid dangerous climate change. In recent years he has become a climate activist to mitigate the effects of climate change, on a few occasions leading to his arrest.