Climate change is the greatest threat facing humanity, and for the past nine months, the Democratic candidates have been jostling to prove which of them is the most serious about tackling the crisis and who has the most effective and ambitious plan to do so. Voters are now weighing the various plans, but some of the country’s leading environmental and climate groups have already singled out a leader in the pack so far: Bernie Sanders and his Green New Deal plan.

In near unanimity, representatives from these organizations pointed to Sanders’s plan as standing above the rest, positioning him as a leader on an issue whose urgency is increasingly recognized by the public.

“At this point, Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal is the most comprehensive and most aggressive of the plans that have been laid out so far,” says Mitch Jones, climate and energy program director at Food & Water Watch. The organization’s national organizing co-director Mark Schlosberg wrote earlier this month that “its scope and ambition dwarf all other proposals,” that it’s a response “big enough and bold enough” to meet the challenge, and that we should “rally around this plan and make it real.”