--- description: Find out why Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez is on TIME's 2025 list of the 100 most influential leaders driving business climate action. title: Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez: The 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders of 2025 image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt584f0d26570fb2b9/6998caf783ec371802c7b0eb/Defenders-Juan-Carlos-Monterrey-Gomez.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Oct 30, 2025 # Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez Special Representative for Climate Change, Panama by [Marina Lopes](/author/marina-lopes/) ## Marina Lopes Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close  Photo-Illustration by TIME (Courtesy Photo) Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez is tearing down one of the biggest obstacles to climate progress: paperwork. As Panama’s first Special Representative for Climate Change and Vice President for Latin America and the Caribbean of the COP30 Bureau, the 33-year-old is leading a quiet revolution: cutting the red tape that stands between goals and action. “People talk about lack of money, people talk about lack of time,” Monterrey tells TIME. “But I mean, the bureaucracy is killing us.” His solution aims to streamline compliance frameworks across government sectors, making it easier to plan, fund, and execute climate action. Monterrey spearheaded Panama’s Nature Pledge, the world’s first framework to unify climate, biodiversity, ocean conservation, plastics, and land restoration commitments into a single plan. The pledge has positioned Panama at the forefront of countries rethinking governance. “No country in more than 30 years of environmental governance has dared to say…‘This system is too complicated; we’re going to do it our way. Take it or leave it,’” Monterrey says. Other countries, including Colombia and the Dominican Republic, are now developing similar frameworks. Streamlining commitments doesn’t just simplify governance; it unlocks funding. As Monterrey puts it: “If you put an investment plan with this holistic vision and you only have to present one instead of 15 plans, it’s easier to get the resources you need.” Monterrey answered TIME’s survey on the state of the climate movement: **What is the single most important action you think the public, or a specific company or government, needs to take in the next year to advance the climate agenda?** The most important action is courage. The courage to choose people and planet over profits. For individuals, that means getting involved in politics and working tirelessly to put climate-smart leaders in office. We cannot afford on-the-job training for those who hold our future in their hands. For companies, it means building real roadmaps to carbon neutrality and beyond, divesting from fossil fuels, and confronting the climate risks to their own assets. For governments, the task is clear: consult, consult, and consult, because you will not win the race alone. Bring civil society and the private sector to the table, not as spectators, but as partners. And above all, phase out fossil fuel subsidies in a way that does not punish the poorest. Every year, governments spend hundreds of billions propping up oil, gas, and coal, while adaptation and clean energy go underfunded. This is not only environmentally reckless, it is economically unjust. Redirect even a fraction of those subsidies, and you can accelerate renewable energy, protect the most vulnerable, and prove that climate action is also an act of fairness. **What’s one sustainability effort you personally will try to adopt in the next year?** I commit to radical transparency in climate policy making. For too long, climate and environmental policy have been shaped behind closed doors, while the farmers, women, and young people who live with the consequences are left outside. That has to change. I am dedicating myself to opening those doors in Panama, across Latin America, and on the global stage. Communities on the frontlines must not just benefit from projects, they must lead. They must sit at the same tables as ministers, CEOs, and negotiators. Because sustainability is not only about carbon-tons-avoided. It is about dignity restored, voices heard, and justice delivered. If we fail to embed that truth at the heart of our efforts, we will lose not just the fight against climate change, but the trust of the very people we claim to serve. **What is a climate solution that isn't getting the attention or funding it deserves?** Rewilding: restoring ecosystems and allowing nature to heal itself. When forests, mangroves, and rivers are given space to return, so too does life: water flows back into fields, pollinators return to farms, and dignity is restored to communities. But the true power of rewilding lies in who leads it. Across Latin America, it is women and girls who are on the frontline of defending and restoring nature. When we invest in their leadership, rewilding becomes more than carbon capture, it becomes community resilience, food security, and hope for the next generation. Rewilding, led by empowered women, is one of the most scalable, just, and transformational solutions we have. Yet it remains dramatically underfunded. If the world backed it with the urgency it deserves, we would not only heal the planet, we would heal ourselves. **What gives you hope about the future of the planet?** Hope is not a passive feeling. It is an active choice to believe that despair is not an option. What gives me hope is that young people and communities are impatient with incrementalism, fearless in challenging entrenched interests, and unwilling to accept a future defined by excuses. From the grassroots to the global stage, people are showing that the future is still ours to write, if we are brave enough to claim it. Their determination reminds us that climate action is not only about preventing catastrophe, it is about reimagining how we live, how we cooperate, and how we define prosperity itself. My hope is their defiance, their creativity, and their refusal to surrender. That courage is contagious, and it is what makes this movement unstoppable. **If you could stand up and talk to world leaders at the next COP, what would you say?** You are writing death warrants with every barrel of oil, every coal mine, every pipeline you approve. You dress it up as growth, but let’s name it for what it is: violence. Violence against the poor, against women. You hide behind targets for 2050 while entire communities drown today. You speak of “transition” while still pouring trillions into the fuels that are killing us. We do not need your applause or your promises. We need you to end fossil fuels, now. And if you will not, then history will remember you not as leaders, but as criminals against humanity and against the Earth itself. 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