Tony deBrum
Tony deBrum was a Marshallese politician and government minister. He helped organize the Marshall Islands' independence from the United States and later served as Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands from 1979 to 1987, from 2008 to 2009 and from 2014 to 2016. He was the Minister in Assistance to the President of Marshall Islands from 2012 to 2014. He was particularly outspoken on climate change, and participated in numerous conferences and demonstrations, including the People's Climate March in New York City in September 2014.
In mid December 2015, he took part in the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference. He succeeded in forming a new coalition between developed countries and developing countries called "High Ambition Coalition". The coalition of over 90 countries was credited with galvanising the conference around the goal of holding global temperatures to a 1.5°C increase.
DeBrum won the 2015 Right Livelihood Award in recognition of his "vision and courage to take legal action against the nuclear powers for failing to honour their disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and customary international law.".
He was an outspoken proponent for ocean thermal energy conversion technology and tried to get the US and Marshallese governments to agree to build a 20 MW floating OTEC power plant by Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands in association with Energy Harvesting Systems of Honolulu, Hawaii. On Kwajalein the local children nicknamed him "Mr. OTEC".
