Climate leaders to watch

Today's newsletter looks at some of the climate leaders working to cut emissions and create a more equitable future. The full version of the story, which is part of Bloomberg Businessweek's July 2025 edition, can be found on Bloomberg.com.

Also, we reflect on the life and work of Manfredi Caltagirone, one of the world's top diplomats on methane, who recently died at the age of 46.

Ones to watch

As the Trump administration slashes climate funding and companies miss emissions targets, there's a growing need for innovative ways to cut carbon and adapt to a hotter world. These leaders are shielding residents from extreme heat, demanding richer nations spend more to protect the Global South and deploying artificial intelligence to speed the energy transition.

Yassamin Ansari

US representative, Arizona

Yassamin Ansari's tentative plan after graduating from college was to work with refugees in Turkey. But a brief phone call with Bob Orr, then-Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's climate adviser at the United Nations, changed her mind. He explained how global warming exacerbates existing problems, including refugee crises. "I was 100% convinced that I needed to go work for him at the UN and on climate," she says. So she did.

After helping work on the Paris Agreement at the UN and organizing some climate conferences, she moved back to her home state of Arizona. There, the Iranian-American tackled climate issues as a member of the Phoenix City Council, helping establish the city's heat office and pushing through a plan to electrify city buses by 2040.

Now in federal office, she's calling out the fossil fuel industry's influence in Washington and introducing legislation on extreme heat "so that Arizonans can afford to keep their air conditioning on in the summer," she says. —Zahra Hirji

Chandni Raina

Adviser, India Ministry of Finance

An "optical illusion." That's how Chandni Raina characterized the $300 billion climate finance deal clinched at COP29. The last-minute criticism was her breakout moment.

Raina has repeatedly called on richer nations to spend more to help the Global South cut emissions and cope with the effects of warming. Based in New Delhi, the finance ministry official has argued for low- and middle-income countries to have a greater voice at international negotiations.

"Access to finance at affordable costs for developing countries is vital for climate action by them," she says.

She has worked as a civil servant for nearly three decades, dealing with industrial disputes, child labor and intellectual-property rights. She began handling the climate finance portfolio in 2020 and has been part of UN negotiations since 2021.

This year, Raina has been shaping India's much-awaited framework and rules for climate finance, with the aim of securing foreign direct investments for nascent technologies such as green hydrogen as well as climate adaptation. —Ishika Mookerjee and Shruti Srivastava

Jon Hennek

Chief product officer, Lila Sciences

The scientific process can be painstakingly slow. Jon Hennek is working to speed it up at Lila Sciences. Lila's goal is to perform cutting-edge research in sustainability and life sciences, with Hennek driving the use of artificial intelligence to develop catalysts and materials key to the energy transition.

Over the last two-and-a-half years, the company has investigated millions of materials using AI and tested the most promising ones in the lab. That includes testing the efficacy of novel sorbents used to capture carbon from air, a technology needed to avert the worst impacts of climate change.

While it's hard to say exactly how much time AI saves, Hennek says the pace of the work feels dramatically different from an all-human lab, where the process of gathering relevant research, creating a hypothesis, setting up an experiment and running it for a single material can take months or even years.

"What Lila is trying to do is fundamentally accelerate the entire wheel of science, not just finding how to do parts of it better," he says. The company emerged from stealth mode earlier this year with $200 million in funding.

Before Lila, Hennek worked at Osmo, a company spun out of Google attempting to teach AI to develop a sense of smell, which could have medical applications. Prior to that, he worked on software that helped farmers implement carbon-sequestering practices. Getting back to his roots by focusing on emission cuts, Hennek says, is what drew him to Lila. —Brian Kahn

Read the profiles of all of the 12 people on Bloomberg Green's Ones to Watch list on Bloomberg.com. For unlimited access to climate and energy news, please subscribe.

Deep sea mysteries

60%

Out of the millions of images of marine organisms collected by scientists, around this percent of species remain unidentified. This is an area of study for another climate leader to watch: Kakani Katija, principal engineer at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

Putting money to work

"Science put on a shelf has no value: You actually have to use it. I'm trying to show that that can be done at the biggest bank in the world."

Sarah Kapnick

Global head of climate advisory, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Kapnick, who was once chief scientist for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has become a rare voice on Wall Street willing to speak up about climate change. She's also one of Bloomberg Green's Ones to Watch.

Manfredi Caltagirone, top methane diplomat, dies at 46

By Aaron Clark

Over the past decade methane, a super pollutant gas responsible for nearly a third of the Earth's warming, moved from the domain of niche scientific papers to the heart of global climate diplomacy. Manfredi Caltagirone was at the center of that shift. He recently died at the age of 46.

Caltagirone conceived of and ran the International Methane Emissions Observatory, an organization that operated more like a Silicon Valley startup than an initiative of the United Nations. Since 2022, his team of scientists and data analysts have scoured satellite data for signs of emissions and notified companies and governments of more than 2,600 giant methane clouds escaping from oil and gas facilities.

The data gave Caltagirone leverage in discussions, but it didn't mean his job was easy: he hoped to convince everyone from Texas wildcatters to Iran's ruling party that their fossil fuel operations were spewing methane and that they should do something about it.

Manfredi Caltagirone Photographer: UNEP

When I visited him last September in his small, cramped office in Paris, we sipped espresso from paper cups as he spoke about that effort. On one wall hung a painting of a polar bear in a snowstorm by one of his two children.

We talked about IMEO notifications' verified success rate. This takes into consideration the amount of flagged emissions that were halted, based on confirmation from operators, governments and subsequent satellite observations. It was less than 1% at the time, a rate that clearly disappointed Caltagirone. But it also masked significant and ongoing progress.

In the isolated central Asian country of Turkmenistan, one of the world's methane hotspots, engineers last year significantly reduced methane spewing from the Darvaza Crater, a site that for years was promoted as a tourist attraction. In Brazil and Kazakhstan, government agencies are now pursuing new methane rules with the aim of stamping them out.

More from Green

China's solar installations surged in May, setting a new monthly record as companies rushed to finish projects before the start of new rules that threaten to slash renewable power prices.

The country installed 93 gigawatts of panels last month, according to data released by the National Energy Administration, four times more than in the same period in 2024. The previous record was 71 gigawatts in December. The May figure means China installed more solar capacity in a single month than any other country did in all of 2024, according to BloombergNEF data.

Worth a listen

When will China's emissions peak? The timing could make a big difference to the fate of the planet. And now Lauri Myllyvirta, co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, thinks that moment may have arrived. On the latest episode of Zero, Akshat Rathi asks Myllyvirta how confident he is that this really is a peak. What's behind the decline in emissions? And how will the trade war with the US affect China's climate and energy policies in the years to come? Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.

A floating solar farm built on the site of a former coal mine, since filled with water, in Huainan, China in 2023. Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg