Sunita Narain

An environmental-policy researcher since 1982, Sunita Narain has won awards for work on issues ranging from rainwater harvesting to tiger conservation to air-pollution mitigation. “The thing I feel good about is that we’ve always focused on the solutions,” she says. Today, she’s concerned that minority voices from the Global South are being drowned out in the climate-change dialogue. “[It] has to be a much more inclusive issue,” she says. “Everybody has the right to development, which means everybody has the right to clean energy.”

Narain believes Indian politicians and media are starting to take climate change more seriously now that floods and devastation have become a reality. Now they—and leaders from other developing countries—need to speak up at a global level to urgently reduce emissions, she says. “I have a lot of faith in humankind, and if you explain the immorality of the impact on the poor, they will understand. Our battle may not be completely lost.” —Naina Bajekal