World Bank President Ajay Banga Among 3 Indian Americans in Top Influential Climate Leaders in Business

World Bank President Ajay Banga, Equatic founder Gaurav Sant, and Electra CEO Sandeep Nijhawan are three Indian Americans are named in TIME magazine’s 100 most influential climate leaders in business, representing  multitudes of individuals making significant progress in influencing the business of climate change. Joining them in the annual list are Sumant Sinha, founder, chairman CEO of India-based ReNew; Madhur Jain, CEO and o-founder of Varaha ClimateAg in New Delhi, and London Mayor Sadiq Khan. 

“Finance is the climate story of 2024,” the magazine says, noting that it is “a theme that has proved inescapable” in this year’s TIME100 Climate list. “Around the world, decision makers, executives, researchers, and innovators are working to help unlock the necessary funding and resources needed to drive successful and equitable climate action.”

As president of the World Bank, Ajay Banga has “woven climate priorities into its mission,” TIME says. He entered the job in 2023 with aspirations of making it less risky for the private sector to invest in the energy transition in the Global South. Since then, “he has pursued a range of seemingly small reforms that can have a big impact accelerating global climate action and intertwining it with the bank’s long-standing development agenda,” the magazine notes. “He has tweaked the rules about how much the World Bank can lend, freeing up space to finance more climate projects, and has sought to integrate climate change into other development programs, from agriculture to education,” it adds.

Gaurav Sant is the founder of Equatic, a startup building North America’s first commercial-scale ocean-based carbon removal facility. Led by Sant, who is also the Director of UCLA’s Institute for Carbon Management, Equatic e”nhances the ocean’s natural ability to trap and store carbon by running an electrical current through captured seawater at its facility,” TIME says. This year the company started manufacturing a breakthrough anode that it says promises to allow it to also use this process to safely produce green hydrogen that can be sold to help make carbon removal affordable at scale.

Sandeep Nijhawan co-founded Colorado-based Electra in 2020. The company aims “to decarbonize iron- and steelmaking through a novel electrochemical process, powered by renewable energy,” according to TIME. In March, it launched a pilot plant to produce iron at the temperature of a cup of coffee. And in April, the company was awarded over $2.8 million from the U.S. Energy Department to support this effort. Nijhawan told the magazine that “a global price on carbon is needed to push companies to adopt tech like Electra’s and accelerate industrial decarbonization. “

Since Sumant Sinha founded ReNew in 2011, the company has become one of the country’s top renewable energy producers, building wind and solar plants across India to help meet its burgeoning energy demand. This year, he was appointed to co-chair the World Economic Forum’s Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders, a group of more than 130 CEOs from some of the world’s largest companies. Sinha’s mission is to help these companies move forward with their own decarbonization efforts while also pushing policymakers for helpful rules.

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Madhur Jain is CEO of Varaha, a company incentivizing sustainable farming in South Asia and Africa by paying smallholder farmers to use regenerative practices that keep carbon in the ground. Varaha quantifies the emissions prevented by these practices, selling high-quality carbon credits on some of the world’s leading carbon marketplaces. With more than 80,000 farmers onboarded and 700,000 acres covered across India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Kenya, Varaha estimates it has sequestered 1.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. In February it raised $8.7 million to expand its operations across Southeast Asia and East Africa.

When Lord Mayor Sadiq Khan was up for reelection in May, TIME mentions how he was “under pressure to  abandon a key green policy,” which included his plan to expand a tax on high-polluting vehicles. Instead of backing down, Khan “doubled down, saying clean air was “a human right” and launching a new 10-point climate action plan.” He won a historic third term by a large margin. Khan, the first Muslim mayor of a major European capital, told the magazine that ‘politicians shouldn’t shy away from climate-centered platforms as green policies aren’t just environmentally friendly, they’re really popular as well.”In his third term, Khan “aims to put London on track to hit net zero by 2030, which will mean insulating over 2 million homes, installing 2.2 million heat pumps, slashing car use, and ending the sale of fossil fuel-powered vehicles,” he told TIME.