Ilona Szabó de Carvalho

Throughout her career in banking Ilona Szabó de Carvalho never imagined she'd someday start a social movement. But living in her native Brazil, which leads the world in homicidal violence, she realized she couldn't just stand by and watch drugs and guns tear her country apart. Szabó de Carvalho reveals four crucial lessons she learned when she left her cushy job and took a fearless stand against the status quo.

Over the last 40 years, Brazil has lost an area larger than California to deforestation — and 90 percent of the clear-cutting has been illegal, all part of a multi-billion-dollar global environmental crime economy. Civic entrepreneur Ilona Szabó de Carvalho sees this crisis as an opportunity. Revealing how Brazil is pioneering an economic model actually profiting from protecting nature, she shares the ambitious restoration goals and innovations in forest mapping that are turning the country into a "nature superpower." Get a glimpse of what an economy rooted in regeneration, not extraction, could look like.