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Record-shattering heat, billion-dollar storms and rising seas are unfolding as political pushback, misinformation and wavering international agreements threaten to stall climate progress. Yet across sectors and continents, a new climate economy is advancing anyway—fueled by record clean energy investment, China’s green-tech boom and a worldwide surge in renewable power. In a moment of fading political consensus, but accelerating real-world change, decisive leadership matters more than ever.
Now in its second year, the Forbes Sustainability Leaders list honors 50 people setting the pace for a just, sustainable economy and defining what climate leadership looks like today. From harnessing AI while meeting soaring energy demands to restoring ecosystems and reshaping global finance, they are not simply working to recover what’s been lost; they are charting the next phase of the transition.
Chosen with the guidance of judges — impact investor Laurene Powell Jobs, actor-activist Jane Fonda, investor and climate financier Tom Steyer, clean energy entrepreneur Jigar Shah, social impact founder Charlot Magayi and biotech CEO Ester Baiget —this year’s honorees prove how breakthrough ideas and targeted investment are continuing to deliver measurable progress. As Steyer puts it, “When the sustainable choice is also the smart choice, the future becomes obvious. What’s left is the courage to deliver it.”
Read about our honorees here
The Big Read
Meet The Landscape Architect Behind China’s Sponge Cities
In July 2012, a massive flash flood struck Beijing as rainfall in the Chinese capital caused the nearby Juma River to overflow its banks. In less than 24 hours, nearly 60,000 people were forced to evacuate their homes and 79 people died. Damages to the city were estimated at around $1.6 billion.
That flood and others like it the same year spurred the Chinese government to pursue new flood control strategies, among them the so-called “sponge city” which uses green spaces to absorb and retain rainwater. It’s a dramatically different approach than building large-scale water diversion infrastructure like levees and concrete, and was pioneered by Kongjian Yu, 62, the founder of landscape architecture firm Turenscape.
Conventional flood strategies, Yu said, “accumulate water, speed up water and fight against water.” By contrast, he designs landscapes that “capture water, slow down water and embrace water.” These same green spaces also help to cool down cities, which see higher temperatures than their surrounding regions because of the prevalence of asphalt and concrete, and to recycle rainwater for local uses.
In 2015, China made sponge cities a national policy–in large part at the urging of Yu, who made hundreds of presentations to Chinese officials over the years. His firm had already proved the concept in cities like Jinhua, where his firm replaced a flood wall with its own landscaping, resulting in improved stormwater control. It launched a series of small-scale pilot projects in dozens of cities, and set standards for local regions to adopt. The goal is for 80% of cities to recycle 70% of their rainwater by 2030. According to the Chinese government, around 40,000 sponge city projects were completed by 2020, and that year saw an amount of rainwater recycled equivalent to about 20% of its total urban water supply. More than 70 cities in China have now begun sponge city initiatives, though issues with implementation and funding have hindered some and in most cities they have not scaled to the point where they can yet prevent extreme flooding events.
Read more here
Hot Topic
Vaness Butani, chief sustainability officer for Volvo Cars, on the push to scale up the use of recycled materials and production sustainability
The company has aggressive targets for reuse and recyclability in its vehicles. What’s your progress at this point?
We’re looking at how we make the car circular. It starts from the beginning with how we’re sourcing materials, both from an environmental perspective and from a social perspective; what kind of materials we’re sourcing, to the lifecycle management of batteries, and then what happens at the end.
Starting with some of our most recent cars, the EX 90, our flagship SUV, and our ES 90, which have a lot of recycled material in there and we’re on our way to more.
There’s 15% recycled content in the EX 90, and it features a battery passport. The battery passport is a QR code inside the door of the car. Basically you can see that QR code, scan it with your phone and … and you get a whole history and story about the battery telling you the health of the battery, where it comes from, the specific minerals inside there, where they come from as well, sourced back to the mine. It’s really trying to take a holistic approach there on how we are bringing good materials into the product. The ES 90 also has the battery passport.
Both of these cars are produced with 100% climate-neutral electricity or renewable energy and are designed to be recovered up to 95% through recycling and energy recovery. We’re working on some other things along with that, for example: mega-casting. When it comes to making the car we’ve got a lot of recycled material in there. Some of that will go into our mega-casting. Mega-casting is cool because it’s really a leap forward in efficiency and sustainability, where we take over 100 components, smaller components in the car’s floor structure, and replace them with one single aluminum part. That helps us to reduce the weight, improve the efficiency and extend the electric range, but also makes the production simpler. It shortens the supply chains and enhances our traceability. This also allows us to use much more recycled material and makes it much more recyclable at the end of life.
Also in our production, we’re reducing waste. I think it’s over 95% waste recovery from our production, so we’re not putting a lot of waste out. We’re making progress for sure.
Volvo Cars isn’t one of the giants of the auto world. What impact can the company have pushing these approaches?
I think because this is where we see we can make an impact. We may be small, but with the ambition that we have, the heritage we have, and also knowing that this is what is expected of us by our customers, by our stakeholders, we want to lead the way.
What Else We’re Reading
Why billionaire Wendy Schmidt is doubling down on climate science in the age of Trump (Forbes)
Sun Day: U.S. climate activists rallying for clean energy as federal policies work to undermine renewables and climate protections (The Guardian)
California isn’t backing down on offshore wind power despite Trump’s efforts to kill it (Los Angeles Times)
Exxon Mobil seeks U.S. political help to quash the European Union’s climate law (Reuters)
Young climate activists attempt to put the Trump administration’s energy agenda on trial in Montana (New York Times)
National Academy of Sciences rebuffs efforts by Trump’s EPA to undo climate regulations (Associated Press)
Trump’s war on wind power has one very big exception: The president’s sons are using scarce clean energy to mine for bitcoins (Mother Jones)
