How do today’s explorers,
scientists and entrepreneurs solve 
Earth’s biggest challenges?

Four passionate, trailblazing experts who have spent years working on separate projects that help to solve some of today’s most pressing problems are united in one common aim – improving the future for life on Earth.

A conservation scientist is using data to reduce deadly conflicts between communities and wildlife in India, while a neuroscientist is offering hope so paralysed patients can walk again. Elsewhere, a tech entrepreneur is helping to give mounting plastic waste a new – and valuable – lease of life, and a conservationist is working to protect Africa’s endangered turtles, tortoises and terrapins.

All of these individuals are making use of cutting-edge science and technology to create innovative, effective solutions, thanks to the support of Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative.

Krithi Karanth, a conservation scientist and educator, who grew up in Karnataka, India, began to forge an intimate relationship with animals in the wild from the age of two. When she was eight she joined her father, a renowned tiger expert and biologist, in the jungle while tracking the animals, and as a teenager learned how to set up camera traps in the undergrowth.

However, few people in her state share her fondness for the wild. In today’s increasingly populated and urbanised India, many conflicts arise each year between village communities and wildlife, such as leopards, tigers and elephants, over food, resources and space for living when these animals enter settlements. Livestock are often killed or injured, crops destroyed and properties damaged, and angry farmers and villagers then retaliate by killing the animals.

The Indian government pays compensation of up to US$5 million annually to people for damage caused by conflict with wildlife, but the claims process is often slow. Karanth’s work involves trying to mitigate the problem, which her research shows involves up to 500,000 cases across the country each year.

In 2015, she set up Wild Seve, a toll-free telephone number, which villagers can call for help in seeking compensation for their losses. The data it collects has helped her team identify high-conflict zones, build predator-proof sheds and fences to protect livestock, and plant alternative crops to mitigate the impact of those that are damaged. This approach has increased trust in the affected communities and reduced their hostility towards wildlife.

Over the years, Wild Seve has expanded its reach in more communities and national parks across India, which has helped more people, especially young children, to form a positive impression of animals in the wild.

In 2018, Karanth shifted her focus to educating India’s youth about wild animals and their natural habitats. Her Wild Shaale programme adopts a practical approach, teaching children how to coexist with wildlife by delving into topics such as conservation through art, multimedia storytelling and play-based learning.

“I don’t think our planet exists just for people,” she says. “If you want people living next to wildlife and to repeatedly tolerate these losses and not retaliate, we have to help them, not just in India, but around the world.”

French neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine is blazing a trail in the future treatment of paralysis. In the past, helping paralysed patients with spinal cord injuries to walk independently was virtually impossible, with most treatments assisting them to live with the condition.

As sport is an integral part of Courtine’s life, he understands the impact that the loss of mobility has on a person’s quality of life. His dream as a physics and neuroscience student was to help young people recover from spinal cord injuries, which impede their movement by blocking signals – or electrical impulses – passing from the brain to the rest of the body.

In 2018, he and Swiss neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch co-founded NeuroRestore, a Swiss research, innovation and treatment centre, which develops bioengineering technology to help restore neurological functions.

The duo spent a decade researching how a stimulated spinal cord can reactivate paralysed muscles before developing an implantable technology called epidural electrical stimulation. It sends electrical signals to specific parts of the spinal cord below a patient’s injury and stimulates movement in the limbs, which allows them to stand up and take a few steps.

However, this process – activated by pressing a button before patients can take a few steps – was cumbersome, so instead of programming the stimulator to activate the legs for each step, they devised a digital bridge that seamlessly converts thoughts using electronic brain implants into action.

The implants, placed in the skull, measure brain signals, which are analysed by a computer and then sent to a spinal cord stimulator to activate the legs. This allows patients to move more naturally and with intention.

Last year, NeuroRestore successfully implanted the digital bridge device into a patient, who could move his legs within a few days of the operation.

Courtine, who became a Rolex Award for Enterprise Laureate in 2019, plans to continue to develop the spinal cord stimulation technology. He hopes that one day it can also be used to help patients suffering from medical conditions caused by things such as a stroke or Parkinson’s disease – a disorder of the nervous system that worsens over time and causes the muscles to become weak and the arms and legs to shake. “I live with this obsession and restlessness,” he says. “Until a cure is achieved, I will never stop.”

About 340 million tonnes of plastic – much of it from food packaging – are produced around the world every year, but only 9 per cent of the plastic waste it creates is recycled, with the rest mostly dumped in landfills.

Miranda Wang, a Chinese-Canadian tech entrepreneur, is helping to tackle what has become one of the world’s growing pollution problems. In 2015 she and Jeanny Yao, her best friend at school, co-founded Novoloop, a recycling technology start-up, which upcycles plastic waste through its unique chemical recycling technology.

The circular economy-driven process transforms plastic waste into valuable performance materials, which can be used to produce consumer products such as footwear, sports goods and automotive parts.

Wang’s interest in trying to reduce waste plastic was sparked as a teenager, when she and Yao went on a school trip to a waste processing plant. Later, as undergraduates, the duo teamed up with senior researchers at Canada’s University of British Columbia to discover two plastic-eating bacteria in the province’s nearby Fraser River. However, the idea was not the best solution to scale up.

Today, they are focused on upcycling polyethylene (PE), a plastic commonly used in products such as cling wrap and carrier bags. PE often comes into contact with food, which makes it contaminated and difficult to recycle.

Fortunately, Novoloop has created a chemical process that breaks down PE waste into “building blocks”, or monomers, which can help to make materials that are used in things such as 3D printing.

Wang says that increasing the potential market value of plastic waste provides a tangible incentive to recycle plastic that would have been thrown away otherwise.

Wang, who received the Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2019, is now raising funds to build Novoloop’s first commercial processing plant to recycle plastic waste on an industrial scale. “We must do something,” she says. “Otherwise, by 2050, there could be more plastic than fish in the oceans.”

Over the past three decades, visionary Senegalese naturalist Tomas Diagne’s efforts to protect Africa’s endangered turtles, tortoises and terrapins – collectively known as chelonians – have grown in scale, reflecting his rapid transformation from amateur conservationist to a leading expert on these reptiles.

Today, he is director of the African Chelonian Institute, which promotes the long-term conservation of these animals on the continent through research, education and grassroots collaboration.

The animal lover kept many pets while growing up on his family’s farm in Dakar, including turtles and tortoises. But in 1993, the then-23-year-old crop scientist was inspired to work as a lifelong conservationist after reading a magazine article about French biologist Bernard Devaux's efforts to protect the endangered Hermann’s tortoise in France.

Africa is known as the motherland of turtles; their earliest-known ancestor, Eunotosaurus africanus, lived in southern Africa’s swamps about 260 million years ago. But today turtles – and tortoises – are under threat because of poaching and bushmeat consumption, while their natural habitats have been disrupted by urban development and fishing activity.

In the mid-1990s, Diagne set up Village des Tortues, or Tortoise Village, close to Dakar – a haven dedicated to conserving and studying turtles and tortoises, including the endangered sulcata tortoise, or African spurred tortoise, which is the third-largest in the world.

Besides breeding these reptiles and releasing them into the wild, the village also conducts public conservation education programmes. Diagne received the Rolex Award for Enterprise in 1998 for his work in helping to save Senegal’s endangered land tortoises, Africa’s biggest, through a breeding sanctuary.

“The award gave me some confidence to tackle even more challenges,” he says. “For a while, I was feeling a little bit alone in turtle conservation. Now, I want to be more open, be more strategic and try to help more people make a career out of it.”

Diagne founded the African Chelonian Institute in 2009, which in addition to breeding rare species and producing scientific papers, mentors young conservation professionals through its African scholarship programme. The programme aims to inspire the next generation of conservationists.

He says nurturing youth is vital to ensure a real and lasting impact on wildlife conservation. “Conservation needs to be popular,” Diagne says. “We need to make conservation accessible for everybody.”

This article is 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.