Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, author, and activist who has dedicated his life to environmental sustainability and transforming the relationship between business and the environment as one of the environmental movement’s leading voices and pioneering architect of corporate ecological reform. His multifaceted work includes founding successful, ecologically conscious businesses, writing extensively about commerce’s impacts on living systems, and consulting with heads of state and CEOs on economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy while demonstrating that business can be a force for environmental healing rather than destruction. Founder of Project Drawdown, a nonprofit organization dedicated to researching when and how global warming can be reversed, Hawken leads efforts to map and model the scaling of one hundred substantive technological, social, and ecological solutions to climate change, providing concrete pathways for addressing the climate crisis through proven interventions. Author of influential books including “The Ecology of Commerce,” “Natural Capitalism” (co-authored with Amory Lovins), and “Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming,” Hawken has shaped understanding of how economic systems can align with ecological principles. His work bridges entrepreneurship, environmental science, and policy advocacy, demonstrating that addressing climate change requires coordinated action across multiple sectors while showing that the solutions already exist and can be scaled effectively. Through Project Drawdown’s rigorous research, Hawken has provided hope and practical direction for climate action by quantifying how existing technologies and practices can collectively reverse global warming if implemented at scale.
Why their voice matters: Hawken provides evidence-based hope for climate action by demonstrating that solutions to global warming already exist and can be quantified, ranked, and implemented, while showing how business practices can shift from extractive to regenerative models that restore rather than deplete natural systems, offering practical pathways for the economic transformation that environmental healing requires.