Carola Rackete

Carola Rackete (;

Rackete participated in several research expeditions to Antarctica and the Southern Ocean and is co-founder of the Antarctic Rights initiative. She also supported the Extinction Rebellion movement and took part in forest protests in Sweden, as well as the occupations of the Hambach Forest and the Dannenrod Forest in Germany. Between 2016 and 2019, she occasionally volunteered for non-governmental sea rescue organisations in the Mediterranean. In June 2019, she was arrested for docking a migrant rescue vessel without authorization in the port of Lampedusa, Italy. The custodial judge considered Rackete's actions as justified because she had a duty to save lives at sea and ruled that Rackete should not have been arrested. In 2021, the pending investigation was formally dismissed, since the state prosecutor did not see a reason to proceed to court.

Early life Rackete was born in Preetz, near Kiel, Germany.

Since completing her degree in conservation management in 2018, Rackete has been working as a conservation ecologist and activist. She supported the environmental movement Extinction Rebellion in its beginning and co-founded Extinction Rebellion Germany in Berlin in 2019. She was involved in the occupations of Hambach Forest and Dannenröder Forest in Germany.

As part of the field research for her master's thesis, Rackete studied the development of the wandering albatross population in South Georgia between 2017 and 2018 and took part in the long-term monitoring of seabirds and vegetation. In spring 2020, Rackete was part of a research cruise to the Antarctic conducted by Greenpeace. In 2023, she worked as a research assistant on a research expedition on fin whales in the West Antarctic conducted by the University of Hamburg on RV Maria S. Merian. Rackete successfully campaigned against the Davis airport project in Antarctica with the Bob Brown Foundation and is committed to the long-term protection of Antarctica and its wildlife. She is a co-founder of the Antarctic Rights initiative and one of the main initiators of the Antarctic Declaration, which calls for Antarctica to be recognised as a legal entity. In 2022, she took part in a protest by the indigenous Sámi population against deforestation in the Arctic and for the land rights of the Sámi.

In her podcast 'Just Nature?', Rackete talks about species extinction and the importance of justice in the global conservation movement.

In November 2021, Racket published the translation of her German environmental justice bestseller, The Time to Act is Now, with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.

Sea-Watch 3 incident of June 2019 On 12 June, The Left is a democratic socialist political party descended from the Marxist-Leninist Socialist Unity Party of Germany. Rackete suggested that the party should consider distancing itself from its past as SED, but apologized for this demand after receiving intense criticism from the party, stating that "the left has come to terms with its past" and sharing a 1989 speech in which the left distanced itself from Stalinism. She said at her presentation that she wanted to give social movements a parliamentary voice, saying that "the climate crisis is the result of capitalist exploitation and it is the biggest crisis of justice in the world".

Following her election to the European Parliament in June 2024, Rackete served as a member of the Committees on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI), on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) and on Agriculture and Rural Development (AGRI).

On 9 July 2025, The Left announced that Rackete gave up her seat in the European Parliament with immediate effect, with the activist citing the successful renewal of the party and discussions about "shaping [her] mandate collectively" as the main reasons behind her resignation; Martin Günther, from Brandenburg, proceeded to take Rackete's seat.