For over three decades, the Goldman Environmental Prize has recognized grassroots environmental justice activists for their work to challenge corporate environmental harms, strengthen community-led conservation, and set powerful legal precedents that shift the needle towards global care, healing, and justice. The awards remind the world what real climate leadership looks like: courageous, community-rooted, and often against impossible odds.
Each year, Global Greengrants Fund is proud to see grantee partners, advisors, close partners, and allies among the Goldman Prize winners. This trend speaks to the power of our decentralized, trust-based grantmaking model, one that reaches deep into communities, long before recognition arrives.
This year, we are proud to see that the 2026 Goldman Prize winners include Yuvelis Morales Blanco, who works with Global Greengrants grantee partner Alianza Colombia Libre de Fracking (Colombia Free from Fracking Alliance) to defend the Magdelena Medio region of Colombia from fossil fuel development that would worsen oil spills, damage ecosystems, and disrupt the livelihoods of communities along the Magdelena River.
What this prize ultimately illuminates is not just the extraordinary leadership of individuals, but the movements that hold and sustain them. Each winner stands within a wider constellation of community organizers, Indigenous leaders, scientists, and advocates whose collective efforts make lasting change possible. From the defense of the Magdalena Medio to countless other struggles unfolding across regions, these recognitions offer a glimpse into the deeper infrastructure of care, resistance, and renewal that grassroots movements embody. It is within these movements that solutions take root, evolve, and endure, and it is through continued, trust-based support that their full power can be realized.
Mobilizing Afro-Colombian Communities Against Fracking
“That river is life—it’s the life that sustains me and my family and our fishing community.”
– Yuvelis Morales Blanco
The town of Puerto Wilches in Colombia, where Yuvelis Morales Blanco grew up, lies on the shores of the beautiful Magdelena River, the largest river system in the Northern Andes. The Magdelena River basin is home to a rich diversity of fish, many of which are endemic. The Afro-Colombian communities of Puerto Wilches have relied on this aquatic biodiversity for food and work for generations, with their livelihoods deeply intertwined with the river and its ecosystems.
Since 1918, however, the Magdelena Medio region, where Puerto Wilches lies, has been a key Colombian oil hub. This has brought oil spills to the region, which have reduced fish populations, harmed ecosystems, and devastated the livelihoods of Puerto Wilches’ artisanal fishing communities. Despite the Colombian government’s moratorium on fracking in 2018, political actors found loopholes, announcing two “pilot” fracking programs near Puerto Wilches in 2019.
After learning about fracking from Alianza Colombia Libre de Fracking, Yuvelis knew she had to act to defend the vital Magdelena River and the Puerto Wilches land and communities that raised her. Together with the Alianza, who received support from Global Greengrants, Yuvelis mobilized her community against the “pilot” fracking programs—even when safety threats from her activism forced her to seek temporary asylum in France in 2022. By organizing protests, sit-ins, and public hearings, and with the Alianza’s support in raising local collective awareness about the potential impacts of fracking, Yuvelis and her community successfully halted the fracking projects. A court order in April 2022 suspended permits for the “pilot” projects, while the incoming Colombian President announced he wouldn’t approve new fracking efforts. In 2024, the community secured further government backing—the Colombian Constitutional Court ruled that the “pilot” fracking projects had violated the Puerto Wilches community’s right to free, prior, and informed consent.
While a new presidential election in Colombia in 2026 could once again alter the fate of fracking, Yuvelis, the Alianza, and the Puerto Wilches community’s successes sent the government an unequivocal message—Colombian communities refuse to sacrifice their lands and livelihoods for corporate profit. The story provides an inspiring model of community mobilization against fossil fuel development. When we invest in communities like theirs consistently and at scale, the impact reverberates globally. Together with grassroots just energy transition efforts around the world, Yuvelis and the Puerto Wilches community are powerfully advancing our collective journey toward climate and environmental justice.
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Yuvelis joins a list of more than 80 Global Greengrants movement partners, advisors, and allies who have received a Goldman Environmental Prize since 1993. Congratulations to Yuvelis, Alianza Colombia Libre de Fracking, and all the inspiring environmental and climate justice defenders who received a 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize!