The 2026 Brower Youth Awards Winners: Six Teens Changing the Planet

Earth Island Institute has named this year's six Brower Youth Awards winners, adding six more names to one of the country's most respected lists of young environmental leaders. The new recipients work on native seed restoration, pollinator protection, post-wildfire recovery, wastewater energy, school climate policy, and climate education. According to the organization's announcement, the Brower Youth Awards winners will be celebrated at the twenty-seventh annual ceremony in Berkeley, California, on October nineteenth.

The award has been running since two thousand, and more than one hundred sixty young environmentalists have received it so far, the organization said. As with past classes, these Brower Youth Awards winners receive leadership training and networking through Earth Island Institute's New Leaders Initiative. Sumona Majumdar, the chief executive officer of Earth Island Institute, said in the announcement that the winners show what young people can accomplish when they build real solutions, pointing to work that ranges from the country's most comprehensive school climate action resolution to microbial fuel cells that convert wastewater into electricity.

Native seeds, pollinators, and hikes with a purpose

Esther Bonney is nineteen and from La Plata, Maryland, where she founded the nonprofit Nurture Natives to promote native biodiversity across the Chesapeake Bay region. The group now partners with dozens of organizations on educational programs and native plant giveaways, the announcement said. So far, Nurture Natives has engaged more than fifteen thousand young people, helped plant three million native seeds, and restored over four hundred twenty acres of habitat across Maryland. Bonney's work earned the twenty twenty-four Presidential Environmental Youth Award for restoring natural ecosystems while giving young people hands-on climate action.

In Toms River, New Jersey, twenty-year-old Kaitlyn Culbert has made pollinators her cause since high school. Her study in Harvard's Journal of Emerging Investigators found a correlation between greater access to native plants and improved honeybee health and survival, according to the announcement. She then created a state-by-state Native Plant Compendium of local native plants covering all fifty states, worked with New Jersey legislators on a Parks, Plants, and Pollinators bill that would prohibit planting non-native species in state parks and forests, and later introduced a congressional bill that would ban neonicotinoids on federal lands. Research paired with legislation is exactly the combination this year's Brower Youth Awards winners share.

A summer job with the Southern Nevada Conservancy gave Garrett Ordonez, twenty-one, of Los Angeles, California, an idea: turn recreational hikers into conservationists. That fall he founded Hike for Habitats, a student-led organization at the University of Southern California that pairs guided hikes with hands-on conservation work, so students help heal the ecosystems they explore, the announcement said. After wildfires burned through the region last year, the group mobilized volunteers for debris removal and recovery efforts in Altadena. The project started as a five-person team and has grown into a community of six hundred people. Land, wildlife, and pollinators carried the first half of this year's Brower Youth Awards winners; the second half works on energy, schools, and education.

Fuel cells from waste and classrooms that act

Growing up surrounded by pollution in her central Mexican town of Cuautlancingo, Puebla, twenty-one-year-old Maritza Sanchez developed a concept in high school for microbial fuel cells that reuse materials from discarded local waste to generate electricity for energy-poor households and improve water quality along the heavily contaminated Atoyac River, according to the announcement. Last year she founded Aquayac Energy, where she designs, builds, and tests fuel cell prototypes, checks water quality after treatment, and measures energy generation. The design is still being refined, but Sanchez expects to scale the project and produce fifty functional fuel cells by twenty twenty-seven.

As a first-year student at the University of Arizona, twenty-one-year-old Ojas Sanghi of Tucson saw that districtwide climate action could cut the Tucson Unified School District's greenhouse gas emissions, reduce students' exposure to air pollution, and pull more young people into the work. As co-lead of the Tucson branch of the Arizona Youth Climate Coalition, Sanghi mobilized a team of fifteen students, the announcement said. Letter campaigns, climate strikes, and a Tucson climate summit led by the coalition pushed the district to adopt the most comprehensive school climate action resolution in the country. Sanghi has since led implementation and is helping other student groups repeat the coalition's success.

Nineteen-year-old Renee Zhao of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, served as director of climate education for the Canadian Youth Climate Action Team. She built curriculum resources that make environmental issues accessible to students from elementary through high school, the announcement said, and the team's programs have reached more than three hundred thousand young people around the globe. Last year, Zhao helped organize the first-ever British Columbia Students' Climate Policy Meeting with members of parliament, where youth advocates representing some ten thousand students pushed for environmental education, emission caps, and equitable climate policies. Teaching runs through several of this year's Brower Youth Awards winners: Bonney's group runs educational programs, Culbert built a compendium for all fifty states, and Zhao writes the curriculum itself.

Why this kind of recognition matters

Award announcements blur together, but the Brower Youth Awards winners list has run for more than two decades, which gives it a track record worth noting. It is also a reminder that young climate work takes more than one form: some teens are taking governments to court over climate inaction, others are fighting for the trees and habitats they love, and these six Brower Youth Awards winners chose the quieter route of building the fix themselves. The full announcement from Earth Island Institute names all six recipients and profiles each winner in more detail, and the ceremony happens in Berkeley on October nineteenth.