The prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, also known as the “Green Nobel Prize”, is awarded yearly to six environmental activists, one from each of the world’s inhabited continents.

This year’s winners include a special education teacher whose activism stopped the construction of a billion-dollar plastics manufacturing plant along the Mississippi River (Sharon Lavigne, United States, North America); a woman whose efforts led to the creation of a national park in Peru the size of Yellowstone (Liz Chicaje Churay, Peru, Latin America); a community leader whose organizing and 500-day blockade of heavy equipment stopped the construction of two dams in the Balkans (Maida Bilal, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Europe); an activist who helped cancel 13 coal power plants (Kimiko Hirata, Japan, Islands); a man who has dedicated his life to rescuing endangered pangolins from the illegal wildlife trade and ending poaching (Thai Van Nguyen, Viet Nam, Asia); and a woman who fought for a national ban on thin plastics manufacturing (Gloria Majiga-Kamoto, Malawi, Africa).