Anti-Fracking Activist Wins Goldman Environmental Prize
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- Yuvelis Morales Blanco was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize — often called the "Green Nobel" — for her role in helping halt hydraulic fracturing in Colombia, part of the prize's first all-women cohort in its 37-year history.
- Morales Blanco co-founded Aguawil, a youth-led anti-fracking organization, in 2019 after fracking pilot projects were proposed in her hometown of Puerto Wilches, a town of 30,000 residents along the biodiverse Magdalena River.
- Morales Blanco faced escalating threats, including her first death threat two years after a resident warned she would get herself killed; in 2022, armed men arrived at her home after a peaceful protest, forcing her to temporarily relocate to France.
- Colombia's environmental defender crisis provides the backdrop: more than a third of all recorded killings of land and environmental defenders between 2012 and 2022 occurred in the country, per Global Witness.
- President Gustavo Petro imposed a nationwide moratorium on fracking shortly after a Colombian court suspended fracking projects pending community consultations, but Colombians return to the polls on May 31 to elect a new president, raising the possibility the ban could be reversed.
- Morales Blanco's work is rooted in the rights of nature movement; she frames the river as family — "I'm the daughter of the river, and I look at nature not as a resource, but as life itself" — and argues that fossil fuels are not a prerequisite for human survival.
Why it matters: Morales Blanco's prize highlights how frontline women defenders in Colombia — the country with the world's deadliest record for environmental defenders — are reshaping climate battles through rights-of-nature legal frameworks rather than traditional regulatory channels. The May 31 presidential election could directly determine whether the fracking moratorium she helped secure survives, making her hard-won gains politically reversible overnight.
