Jeremy Leggett is a social entrepreneur and author who is one of the most respected voices in climate change and the environment. His long and varied career as an academic, climate campaigner and solar energy leader led to him being awarded the Blue Planet Prize in 2025. He has been described as Britain’s most respected green energy boss and was the first ever chairman of the Carbon Tracker Initiative think tank. Jeremy’s current project, Highlands Rewinding, uses small- and large-scale private investors to boost rural communities in Scotland and help prevent biodiversity collapse.
In 1998 Jeremy set up Solarcentury, which grew exponentially across four continents until its acquisition in 2020 by Norwegian energy giant Statkraft. The success of the business enabled Jeremy to set up the SolarAid charity using 5% of its parent company’s profits in order to provide solar energy for two million homes in Africa. SolarAid’s success in bringing social and economic benefits to the continent won it many honours, including a Google Global Impact Award and a BITC Unilever Global Development Award.
Jeremy has written five books on climate change: The Carbon War (2000), Half-Gone (2005), The Solar Century (2009) and The Energy of Nations: Risk Blindness and the Road to Renaissance (2013). His most recent work, The Winning of the Carbon War: Power and Politics on the Front Lines of Climate and Clean Energy, was published in 2019. He has contributed to the Financial Times and The Guardian.
Following a degree in Earth Sciences at Oxford University, Jeremy became an academic at Imperial University’s School of Mines, where he researched earth history as preserved in strata. He then joined Greenpeace International as a climate campaigner, winning the US Climate Institute’s Award for Advancing Understanding. Some of his many awards include the President’s Prize and the Lyell Fund from the Geological Society, UK Climate Week’s Most Inspirational Person, the Gothenburg Sustainability Award, and was the first non-Dutch winner of a Royal Dutch Honorary Sustainability Award. In 2009 he was named Inaugural Laureate of the Hillary Institute Awards.
Jeremy has given lectures on business, the environment and society at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, as well as Cambridge and Oxford Universities.
