•Many scientists and adventurers are helping to document changes, collect data and learning how to preserve our natural world from the effects of global warming
•Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative supports explorers and their expeditions as they take action to find solutions to challenges and guarantee our planet’s future
March 28, 2024
While it may be accurate to say that every corner of the land on planet Earth has been reached by man, there are still wildly courageous people among us who somehow manage to achieve new feats, break boundaries and expand our horizons.
In 2018, the Polish adventurer Mateusz Waligóra became the first man in the world to cross the Gobi desert on foot, enduring sandstorms, hurricanes and extreme temperatures. In 2019, American undersea explorer Victor Vescovo was the first person to dive to the deepest points of the planet’s five oceans. Last year, British army medical officer Harpreet Chandi made news as the fastest woman to ski solo to the South Pole.
A firefighter battles a devastating wildfire (top) and a polar bear walks amid melting polar ice – just two of the problems caused by the impact of global warming in recent years. Photos: Getty Images
Explorers are driven by a wide variety of goals and motivations. Some scientists and adventurers, for example, aim to use their efforts to better understand the planet’s rich complexity and vulnerability. They are working – often against time – to document changes, collect data and learn how to preserve the natural world for generations to come.
This is critical work that demands urgency: many scientists have predicted and warned the world about the effects of climate change that we are now experiencing. The United Nations says these problems include “intense droughts, water scarcity, severe fires, rising sea levels, flooding, melting polar ice, catastrophic storms and declining biodiversity”.
The consequences of climate change have motivated many explorers to dedicate their lives to solving the problems – often while carrying out challenging expeditions in extreme conditions. They are all united in one mission – to protect and restore planet Earth for future generations.
The pioneering expedition, Deepsea Under The Pole by Rolex (above), was carried out in 2010 to learn more about the Arctic’s submerged areas. Photo: Rolex
Swiss watch designer and manufacturer Rolex is backing these important missions. For nearly a century, Rolex has supported explorers and the visionary work of some of the world’s most inspiring individuals through its Perpetual Planet Initiative and the Rolex Awards for Enterprise.
So far, the Rolex Awards for Enterprise have been presented to 160 Laureates – the youngest aged 24, and the oldest 74. Each Rolex Laureate has received support in their efforts to not only understand today’s pressing environmental challenges, but also devise effective scientific solutions.
Together they have planted 33 million trees, protected 52 endangered species – from snow leopards to seahorses – and 32 major ecosystems, including 57,600 sq km of Amazon rainforest, and helped to discover hundreds of new animal and plant species.
Wild camels have roamed the desert's arid plains in Mongolia and China for thousands of year, but the numbers are dwindling. Photo: Rolex/Liu Xiaoxue
Liu Shaochuang, a Chinese remote-sensing specialist, who is trying to save critically endangered wild camels in the Gobi Desert by using space technology, is one of the five Laureates of the 2023 Rolex Awards for Enterprise, who were selected by an independent jury of 10 international experts.
Satellite trackers and remote-sensing technology that helped to track China’s Chang’e lunar rover during testing on the desert’s dry, rocky terrain before its 2013 moon mission, are now being used by Liu on his mission to safeguard the surviving animals. Wild camels have roamed the desert’s arid plains in Mongolia and China for thousands of years.
Yet today, only about 1,000 of the camels remain in the wild and the numbers are dwindling as a result of climate change, habitat loss, predation, hunting, disease, domestication and cross-breeding by humans. Monitoring these camels has proved difficult as they are scattered across 200,000 sq km of wild, inhospitable plains.
To resolve this, Liu and his team have fitted seven camels with tracking collars. Once the collars reveal the camels’ positions, he can use remote sensing to study changes in their habitat, which could offer new insights that will help to preserve them – all from his desk in Beijing.
“Finding out where wild camels go, where they drink and what kinds of threats they face will help us draw up plans to better protect their water sources and define their protection zone,” says Liu, who regularly returns with his team to the Gobi Desert to track the camels’ movements.
Data collected from this mission will be instrumental to help set up two huge conservation zones: the China Wild Camel National Park and the China-Mongolia Cross-border Wild Camel Nature Reserve.
In 2019, Rolex launched the Perpetual Planet Initiative. This signals the luxury brand’s move from championing exploration for the sake of discovery to protecting the planet, and its commitment to providing long-term support to individuals and organisations who are using science and cutting-edge technology to better understand and devise solutions to today’s environmental challenges.
National Geographic Society is one of the partners of Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative. Together they support the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Expeditions, aiming to generate data and reveal insights about the impact of climate change on the systems – interacting physical, chemical, and biological processes – that are vital to life on Earth: mountains, as the world’s water towers, rainforests, as the planet’s lungs, and the ocean, as its cooling system.
One such expedition was made in April 2019 to Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak, by National Geographic and Tribhuvan University, a public university located in Kirtipur, Kathmandu, Nepal.
The mountain, known locally as Chomolungma or “Goddess Mother of Mountains”, forms part of the Hindu Kush-Himalaya region, stretching more than 3,500km across eight countries, which is the source of glacial waters that sustain about one billion people.
National Geographic Society in partnership with Tribhuvan University, leads an international team of scientists and explorers up Mount Everest to conduct a scientific trip that is believed to be the most comprehensive single scientific expedition to the mountain in history. Photo: National Geographic Society
Climate change is causing these glaciers to retreat, placing millions potentially at risk from deadly flooding and landslides. So information from the expedition, coupled with additional data sets on water supply and demand in the region, will form the basis of a new index to track the health of the Himalayan water system and inform decisions to help protect it.
Through the collection and analysis of the data, these explorers hope to provide information that will help governments and communities better understand the changes that are taking place, for themselves and for the world, and offer a scientific basis for solutions to the existential risks now facing humanity.
This article is first part of a four-episode series, Preservers of our natural world, which highlights the work of organisations and individuals supported by Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative to safeguard our planet’s future for generations to come.