Colette Pichon Battle
climate activist and lawyer
Colette Pichon Battle is an American lawyer and climate justice organizer. Her work focuses on creating spaces for frontline communities to gather and advance climate crisis strategies that help us steward the water, energy, and land. She is a TED speaker, a 2019 Obama Foundation Fellow, and is the recipient of the 2023 Heinz Award for the Environment, the 2022 Catalyst Award from Rachel’s Network, and the 2022 William O. Douglas Award.
Colette is the co-founder and Vision & Initiatives Partner for Taproot Earth and is a former corporate lawyer. Internationally, Colette has gained recognition for her outstanding use of the legal and judicial process to achieve environmental goals. After 17 years of work leading the development of programming focused on equitable climate resilience in the Gulf South by Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy (GCCLP), in 2022, she expanded her vision into Taproot Earth, inspired by her learnings with GCCLP and movement partners across the South.
Life
Battle was raised in Bayou Liberty, Bonfouca, Louisiana. She attended Kenyon College (class of 1997), from Slidell, majoring in international studies, and took a J.D. degree at Southern University Law Center in 2002.
She was chosen as an Echoing Green Climate Fellow in 2015, was recognised as a White House Champion of Change for Climate Equity in 2016, and received an Honorary Doctorate from Kenyon College in 2018. She was recognized as an Obama Fellow in 2019, for her work with climate change-affected Black and Native communities.
The public source identifies “Colette Pichon Battle” as climate activist and lawyer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Colette, Pichon and Battle.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q99439559. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2019, 2023, 2022 and 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Colette Pichon Battle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.