Expelled from his Durban high school aged 15 for activism against apartheid, Naidoo ended up in exile in the UK until Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 (picking up a PhD in political sociology from Oxford along the way). Eagerly building on Greenpeace’s history of civil disobedience, Naidoo spent four days in a Greenlandic prison in summer 2011 after scaling an oil platform owned by Cairn Energy. After the disappointment of the Rio +20 talks in summer 2012, he drew on his experience in the struggle against apartheid and announced Greenpeace would be moving to a “war footing”. An eloquent speaker and writer, we’ve seen a lot of Naidoo in recent debates over the Arctic, and can expect to see more. He is @kuminaidoo on Twitter.
Kevin Anderson
Engineer calling for radical emissions cuts
Winnie Byanyima
Pushing gender and justice in the climate debate
Jeremy Farrar
Could he help bring biomedicine to the climate debate?
Van Jones
Painting a future of green jobs
Grassroots activists
Real, not astroturf
Li Keqiang
Premier of the planet’s biggest emitter
Crystal Lameman
First Nations voice in North American environment policy
Melissa Leach
Opening up discourse on sustainable development
Michael Liebreich
Olympian voice for new energy finance
Malini Mehra
Working with the Indian diaspora and more for global corporate responsibility
Kumi Naidoo
Fearless Director of Greenpeace International
Sunita Narain
Indian environmental activist
David Roberts
Covering the climate beat, one PDF at a time
Claudia Salerno
A bloodied hand for climate change
Yeb Saño
Unlikely star of Warsaw talks
Amartya Sen
Indian economist and philosopher
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz
Championing rights of indigenous peoples
Desmond Tutu
South African social rights activist
Mark Watts
Cities as global leaders
Malala Yousafzai
New youthful voice on climate?