WHAT IS POSSIBLE

It began in 1992, when 12-year-old Severn Cullis-Suzuki quieted the room at the Rio Earth Summit. Three decades later her successors are everywhere: Greta Thunberg turned a solo school strike into a movement of millions – and made short work of greenwashing, from "net zero" accounting tricks to the rainforest offsets that a 2023 investigation found were mostly unlikely to represent real emission reductions. Lilly Platt collects plastic by the hundreds of thousands of pieces; Melati and Isabel Wijsen pushed back plastic bags from Bali; the Dutch Young Climate Movement published a full vision of what the Netherlands should look like in 2040 – economy, energy, food, education.

The vision these girls share is remarkably consistent: justice at the core, science as the compass, and a different economic model – from depleting the Earth and people to equality and the power of community. Xiye Bastida named the root causes to world leaders' faces: colonial, extractive, market-driven systems, with "sacrifice zones" paying the price. Vanessa Nakate showed what gets erased – literally, when she was cropped out of a press photo of white activists – and argues that climate justice is impossible without ending poverty and achieving gender equality.

And there is a structural reason to listen: girls' education ranks among the highest-impact climate solutions identified by Project Drawdown, alongside access to voluntary family planning. Yet an estimated 129 million girls remain out of school. Education, as Malala Yousafzai puts it, is hope – and education brings peace. Young people have no lobby behind them and no shares in the outcome except one: a livable future.

Economics has been a man's world – since the prize began in 1969, only three women have received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences: Elinor Ostrom (2009), Esther Duflo (2019) and Claudia Goldin (2023). Yet it is women economists who are redrawing the map. Ostrom proved communities can manage shared resources sustainably – cooperation instead of privatization. Kate Raworth's donut model puts the economy where it belongs: meeting everyone's essential needs within planetary boundaries – of which, according to the 2023 update, six of nine are already transgressed.

The redesign is practical, not theoretical. Ellen MacArthur and Eva Gladek are engineering the circular economy sector by sector. Mariana Mazzucato showed that governments can be entrepreneurial – Tesla's early lifeline was a $465 million U.S. Department of Energy loan. Femke Groothuis' Ex'tax makes the tax system work for the transition: tax pollution and resources instead of labor. Stephanie Kelton reframed public debt as strategic investment in the future. Vandana Shiva leads millions of farmers toward regenerative, decolonized agriculture.

And women get it done on the ground: Marjan Minnesma won the landmark Urgenda climate case against the Dutch state – three times – inspiring over sixty lawsuits worldwide, and delivered a 54-point plan showing how climate goals can be met. Meanwhile the top of global finance shifted: under Christine Lagarde and Kristalina Georgieva the IMF made climate a core macroeconomic issue, the ECB built a climate agenda, and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala brought environment into the WTO. The direction is unmistakable – an economy that serves people and planet. Now Wall Street needs to follow.

The future depends on what we make of it together. That is not a platitude but a working method. The All We Can Save community (Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katherine Wilkinson) shows the power of women's collective climate leadership – including the insight that transitions fail when workers are forgotten: include the people in coal mines, steel plants and airports, and you build a better future with them.

Citizens' assemblies – championed in the Netherlands by Eva Rovers – bring that logic into democracy. Evidence from Ireland, France and the UK suggests they can increase trust, reduce polarization and improve policy legitimacy, especially when their recommendations are genuinely taken up. The 2022 Dutch farmer protests illustrated the opposite: what happens when far-reaching policy lands without early dialogue and credible perspectives for those affected.

Collaboration also crosses generations and continents. Wangari Maathai's Green Belt Movement planted tens of millions of trees, creating income and resilience for hundreds of thousands of Kenyan women – earning her the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. And at Rio+20, a coalition of women negotiators – Kitty van der Heijden, Paula Caballero, Jimena Leiva Roesch – laid the groundwork for what became the Sustainable Development Goals, in a process that deliberately included youth, Indigenous peoples and women's groups. The lesson repeats at every scale: a relational model of trust, care and shared strength achieves what hierarchies of dominance cannot.