Laureates by Category

An attorney and member of California’s Indigenous Yurok Tribe, Amy Bowers Cordalis has spent decades striving to restore the natural flow of the Klamath River in the United States.

The Klamath, which runs through the states of Oregon and California, was once…

Gabriel Paun doesn’t know how he’s survived this long.

The 47-year-old Romanian environmental defender has been assaulted, stalked, threatened and driven off the road. After years of cataloguing illegal logging in Romania’s national forests, he says he has a bounty on his head.

“I'm not upset or angry or worried. Nothing to complain…

Amid the rolling sand dunes and jagged stone pillars of China’s Ulan Buh Desert, hundreds of scientists are gathered at the Desert Forestry Experimental Centre.

Located in Inner Mongolia’s Bayannur City, they pore over data and prepare drought-resistant saplings under the watchful guidance of Lu Qi, Chief Scientist of the Chinese Academy…

Indian ecologist Madhav Gadgil learned from a young age the importance of respecting the rights of the least fortunate.

One of Gadgil’s most formative early memories was accompanying his father – an economist and statesman – on a visit to a hydroelectric project in India’s Maharashtra state. Deforestation was rampant in the surrounding…

The SEKEM story begins in the Egyptian desert with a tent, a tractor and a piano.

In 1977, the initiative’s founder, Ibrahim Abouleish, returned to Egypt after 20 years working abroad in chemistry and pharmacology.

At the time, Egypt was facing a dilemma. It had to feed a fast-growing population, but its agricultural sector was…

Born in the Amazon rainforest, Sonia Guajajara never expected she would one day make history as the first-ever Indigenous woman to become a minister in Brazil.

But that is what happened in January 2023, when President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva appointed Guajajara as Minister of Indigenous Peoples. Guajajara, 50, is the first person to…