--- title: Riley Duren: The 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders of 2025 description: Find out why Riley Duren is on TIME's 2025 list of the 100 most influential leaders driving business climate action. canonical: https://time.com/collections/time-100-climate-2025/7326621/riley-duren/ article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-10-30T11:30:16.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-03T01:02:00.890Z article:section: Climate og:title: Riley Duren: The 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders of 2025 og:description: Find out why Riley Duren is on TIME's 2025 list of the 100 most influential leaders driving business climate action. og:url: https://time.com/collections/time-100-climate-2025/7326621/riley-duren/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt92fbda9448fa0283/6998cb421f6709a7bdf56e48/Catalyst-Riley-Duren2.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: Riley Duren: The 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders of 2025 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Riley Duren: The 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders of 2025 twitter:description: Find out why Riley Duren is on TIME's 2025 list of the 100 most influential leaders driving business climate action. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt92fbda9448fa0283/6998cb421f6709a7bdf56e48/Catalyst-Riley-Duren2.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Oct 30, 2025 # Riley Duren Founder and CEO, Carbon Mapper by Riley Duren  Photo-Illustration by TIME (Courtesy Photo) _Riley Duren, an alumni of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is the founder of Carbon Mapper, a free mapping tool that observes greenhouse gas pollution and fills in gaps in existing emissions data, accurate and detailed down to the facility or equipment level. It combines data from government and private sources, such as NASA’s EMIT instrument on the International Space Station, and a satellite called Tanager-1, owned and operated by Planet Labs, PBC, which partnered with Carbon Mapper to develop the satellite. The NGO is planning to launch three new satellites with partners. Last year, Carbon Mapper helped spot and stop a major methane leak in the Permian Basin. This September the company announced a partnership with the government of Kazakhstan, the Global Methane Hub, and the Clean Air Task Force to monitor and regulate methane emissions from industries like oil and gas._ **What is a climate solution that isn't getting the attention or funding it deserves?** Reducing human greenhouse gas emissions is one critical response to climate change. Another is sustainable land use, which includes prioritizing biodiversity. Healthy natural ecosystems remove carbon from the atmosphere and oceans, offer resiliency to climate impacts such as fire, floods, and storms, and provide invaluable resources like revenue from tourism, food production, and human health. Despite ongoing conservation efforts around the world, natural landscapes and biodiversity are being degraded on nearly every continent—in some cases, facing potential tipping points (beyond which critical ecosystems cannot be restored). So, in parallel with cutting emissions, there is also an urgent need to prioritize biodiversity and restore resilience in natural ecosystems while there’s still time. **What gives you hope about the future of the planet?** What gives me hope is the power of data and collaboration to drive real-world change and tackle the climate crisis. I spent my entire career at NASA applying systems thinking to problem-solving. One example of that is helping establish the tiered observing strategies that have emerged for tracking methane emissions that exploit synergies between satellite, ground-based, and airborne instruments. This confluence of technology and complementary vantage points offers the global multi-scale insights needed to better understand and manage methane emissions. Data is powerful not just in itself, but in its ability to convey results, tell stories, share lessons, understand trends and patterns, and plan for the future. In my meetings with government stakeholders, scientists, private companies across the oil and gas sectors, financial leaders, and community organizers, I hear the same thing—they want more data and expert help in translating it into action. These leaders want to be able to make smarter climate decisions and track progress. It gives me hope that the technologies and coalitions detecting, analyzing, and disseminating that data are getting better and better. In the last few years alone, we’ve been able to make the invisible visible through an expanding network of methane-detecting satellites. Across the U.S., studies show that mitigating just a handful of persistent methane “super-emitters” can eliminate tens of thousands of metric tons of emissions each year—reducing near-term warming while also saving energy and improving public health. That kind of impact shows that when people have the right information, they can act decisively and effectively, creating a positive feedback loop for climate action. **If you could stand up and talk to world leaders at the next COP, what would you say?** I would tell world leaders that reducing methane now can prevent runaway global warming. As a potent super-pollutant, methane accelerates near-term warming far faster than CO2, yet we already have the technology to identify and stop emissions quickly and cost-effectively. What’s missing is increased observational completeness, improved data transparency, and expanded incentives to act. By scaling monitoring systems and making that data accessible, we can mitigate runaway global warming while improving air quality, protecting community health, and supporting energy security. Methane reduction is an opportunity for immediate climate wins that deliver benefits across society. This COP30, world leaders have a unique opportunity to drive that action. All nations, including the COP30 host, Brazil, can tackle methane from the agriculture, waste, and energy sectors. With monitoring, investment, and transparency data, COP30 can set strong momentum toward achieving the Global Methane Pledge and other critical global methane targets. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time-100-climate-2025/7326621/riley-duren/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time-100-climate-2025/7326621/riley-duren/"},"headline":"Riley Duren","datePublished":"2025-10-30T11:30:16.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-03T01:02:00.890Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/collections/time-100-climate-2025/7326621/riley-duren/","keywords":["TIME100 Climate 2025","list","franchise","Magazine","Special Project","sponsorshipblock","Accolades"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt92fbda9448fa0283/6998cb421f6709a7bdf56e48/Catalyst-Riley-Duren2.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME Staff","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/time-staff/"}],"creator":"TIME Staff","articleSection":"Climate","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt92fbda9448fa0283/6998cb421f6709a7bdf56e48/Catalyst-Riley-Duren2.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/climate/","name":"Climate"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time100-climate-2025/","name":"TIME100 Climate 2025"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/time-100-climate-2025/7326621/riley-duren/","name":"Riley Duren"}}]}] ```