Finance is the climate story of 2024. And it’s a theme that has proved inescapable in our TIME100 Climate list of influential climate leaders in business this year. Around the world, decision makers, executives, researchers, and innovators are working to help unlock the necessary funding and resources needed to drive successful and equitable climate action.
It’s a story encapsulated by our cover subject, Ajay Banga, who, as president of the World Bank, has woven climate priorities into its mission. Banga entered the job in 2023 with aspirations of making it less risky for the private sector to invest in the energy transition in the Global South. And innovative approaches to funding the climate fight are playing out in every sector—from inside Microsoft’s C-suite, where the company’s chief sustainability officer Melanie Nakagawa helped spearhead what’s thought to be the largest corporate investment in renewable energy deployment to date, to the island of Grenada, where President Dickon Mitchell deployed a first-of-its-kind debt clause postponing $30 million in repayments, allowing the country to prioritize hurricane recovery efforts.
To identify this year’s changemakers, TIME’s editors spent months vetting names from across the economy. We valued measurable, scalable achievements over commitments and announcements. We favored more recent action. The result is our second annual TIME100 Climate list which represents multitudes of individuals making significant progress in influencing the business of climate change. We asked them to talk about it, hoping their words will stir others to do the same.
