All Laureates

Samson Parashina, a Maasai warrior, son of a local chief and respected safari guide, has shown amazing commitment to developing sustainable green economy models for Kenya’s Kuku Group Ranch, land communally owned by the Maasai community.

Parashina started as a waiter at an ecotourism lodge, but swiftly rose to become the President of the…

To most people, fins, masks and neoprene wetsuits are recreational gear. But to the non-profit group Sea Women of Melanesia, this year’s Champion of the Earth for Inspiration and Action, they are the tools of change.

Clad in diving gear, the group’s 30-plus members chart the health of the fragile coral reefs that surround Melanesia, a…

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…

When Sir David Attenborough was a boy, he spent much of his free time bounding through abandoned quarries in the English countryside, hammer in hand. His prey: fossilized ammonites, spiral-shaped mollusks that lived in the time of the dinosaurs.

To a young Attenborough, the fossils were like buried treasures and he was amazed to be the…

When the United Kingdom Treasury approached Sir Partha Dasgupta in 2019 to carry out a review of the economics of biodiversity, the first time a finance ministry is believed to have commissioned such a study, the eminent Cambridge University economist did not think twice about saying “yes”.

Over the next 18 months or so, Dasgupta and his…

There are some individuals so accomplished, so on the nail with their science and insight, and so omnipresent at award ceremonies that one could be forgiven for suspecting they have secretly been busy cloning themselves to carry out so much ground-breaking work. Sir Robert Watson, an eminent scientist who is highly regarded as one of the world’…

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…

The word “legend” is one that should be applied with judicious care, but few deserve the tag more than Dr. Sylvia Earle—a renowned pioneer of deep sea exploration and conservation so synonymous with the topics that she now has a Lego figurine modelled after her, complete with little yellow flippers.

Consider the titles, official and…

Tena Kebena is a non-governmental organization in Ethiopia that brings together around 80 children and youth who have been mostly orphaned by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The group cleans up and rehabilitates garbage dumpsites around Addiss Ababa through reforestation. The sites are also used for urban agriculture and the herbal medicines obtained…

For the last thirty years, Timothy E. Wirth has been an advocate for environmental issues in the United States. As the president of the United Nations Foundation and Better World Fund, Mr. Wirt has established the environment as a key priority and is mobilizing strong resources to address crucial issues from biodiversity to climate change and…