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 the…

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…

In a scene unchanged for generations, fishers rise before dawn to trawl the coastal waters of China’s Zhejiang province, hoping for a bountiful catch.

These days, many are just as likely to return to shore with a cargo hold full of plastic as they are with fish.

That is because since 2019, the Blue Circle environmental initiative…

On a sprawling campus in Pretoria, scientists, engineers and researchers are hard at work in South Africa’s biggest and best-resourced laboratory complex. Hunched over microscopes, peering into petri dishes and meticulously recording test results, they have a shared vision: to improve the quality of life for all South Africans, as…

Ellen MacArthur was only 24 when she secured a place in the history books by becoming the youngest person to sail solo around the world in 2001. Four years later, she broke the record for the fastest solo circumnavigation of the globe, taking just over 71 days to complete the voyage.

Her account of battling squally gales, skirting…

It was only when José Manuel Moller began living on the outskirts of Santiago in a low-income neighbourhood that he experienced what is known as "poverty tax" – the extra costs people incur due to their economic circumstances.

A university student at the time, Moller was in charge of buying groceries for the house he shared with friends.…