Kenyan Susan Chomba is one of the only women from the African continent among the world’s top climate scientists, and she uses her scientific knowledge to take stands against governments on the continent that cling to traditional practices that are detrimental to the environment and to women.

In just one of those disagreements, the Kenyan government has endorsed the idea that cooking should be done over wood fires, with wood gathered by women and girls, as it always has been. Chomba insists that this must stop, that women and girls’s lives should not be consumed with finding wood to burn, and that losing trees and producing smoke cannot go on. The government also supports the production of charcoal, an environmentally damaging practice that’s actually illegal.

Chomba knows the science whereof she speaks, despite traditional thinkers who would rather see her gathering wood to cook dinner instead of speaking out against such common practices. There’s also class snobbery working against her—Chomba does not come from the educated elite. Her single-parent mother was a subsistence farmer on a small plot of land in rural Kenya, leaving child-rearing to a very wise grandmother.

“She used to tell me if she could have gone to school, she would have studied so much that knowledge would be smoking out of her nostrils. She made sure that I knew that education was my only path out of poverty, out of the life we had back then.”

A boarding school turned Chomba down because of her “shabby clothes” but she applied to another and got in. In high school, she experimented with organic farming—successfully—and that started her quest to understand all things agricultural. She studied agroforestry in college, joined the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry, and led an eight-country land restoration program. Then she got a Ph.D at the University of Copenhagen.

Currently, Doctor Chomba is the Director of Vital Landscapes for Africa at the World Resources Institute, working to restore degraded lands with new technologies in Rwanda, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Niger, Ghana, Mali and Senegal. Her experience as the daughter of a woman who farmed to feed her family informs that work.

“If you look at the way the world operates,” she says, “it’s almost blind to the fact that women bear the biggest burden and brunt of climate change.” Susan Chomba is changing that.