2019 Rolex Awards for Enterprise

The Rolex Awards for Enterprise were established in 1976 to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the Rolex Oyster chronometer, the world’s first waterproof wristwatch. They were designed to foster a spirit of enterprise, advance human knowledge and well-being, and protect our cultural heritage and the environment. Rolex has a long-standing commitment to preserve the world around us and recently launched a campaign for a Perpetual Planet – providing support to key individuals and organisations finding solutions to the world’s environmental challenges.

National Geographic, a partner in the Perpetual Planet campaign and an organisation that has been linked to Rolex since the early 1950s, hosted the National Geographic Explorers Festival, where the 10 finalists of the 2019 Rolex Awards presented their projects.

The Rolex Awards jury – a group of independent experts – first met in February to select the 10 finalists from a shortlist created from a field of 957 candidates representing 111 countries. For the first time in the 43-year history of the Awards, the public was then invited to vote on its favourite projects through a social media campaign.

The results of the public vote were factored into the jury’s final decision made at a second meeting during the Festival.

João Campos-Silva, 36, Brazil
The giant arapaima, the largest scaled freshwater fish in the world, is headed for extinction – unless the peoples of the Amazon rally to rescue it.

João Campos-Silva, a young Brazilian conservationist, in a close partnership with local associations and fishing leaders, is determined to save not only the arapaima but, along with it, the livelihoods, food supply and culture of rural communities in Amazonia who depend on the region’s rivers for their survival.

“The arapaima is a fantastic fish. It is very large – up to 3 metres – and can reach 200 kg. It has played a central role in feeding Amazonian people since the development of the first human society in the region,” says Campos-Silva.

Due to overfishing, habitat fragmentation and other human impacts, wild populations of arapaima have been decimated, almost to the point of extinction in many localities.

Campos-Silva, a 36 year-old fisheries biologist, has already helped to prove the arapaima can be saved. On the Juruá River in the western Amazon, closing small, river-connected lakes to fishing, combined with careful fishery management by local people, has resulted in a spectacular 30-fold recovery in arapaima numbers.

His plan now is to take this local experiment to the next level, extending the conservation plan to 60 communities comprising 1,200 people living across 2,000 km of the Juruá River. His goal: to increase arapaima populations fourfold in three years.

It is not only the arapaima that stands to benefit. Closing lakes to hunting and fishing has brought back other threatened species from near-collapse, including manatees, giant otters, giant turtles and black caiman, he says.

The recovery in fish numbers has improved catches, so that each lake now yields an average of 9,000 dollars in extra annual income for local communities, enhancing community life and prosperity, and providing schools, healthcare and jobs; for the first time women can earn a living from professional fishing. Campos-Silva believes saving the fish is an antidote to poverty. “I believe that community-based management of arapaima is the most powerful tool that we have to ensure a sustainable future for the Amazon floodplains.”

Grégoire Courtine, 44, France
For all human history, a seriously injured spine has meant permanent loss of the ability to walk. Now, in an advance that would have seemed miraculous until very recently, a French medical scientist based in Switzerland is helping paralysed patients to walk again.

Grégoire Courtine has developed an electronic “bridge” that can be implanted between the patient’s brain and lumbar spinal cord. Supported by wireless technology, the system links signals from the brain controlling voluntary movement with electrical stimulation of the lower spinal cord.

This targeted electrical stimulation of the lumbar spinal cord uses pulses timed to coincide with natural movement signals from the brain. It is reinforced by a robotic weight-support system for patients whose paralysis is caused by a spinal cord that has not been completely severed.

The neuroprosthetic bridge aims to restore immediate voluntary control over leg muscles in conjunction with gait-supported rehabilitation. In turn, this will encourage the re-growth of spinal nerves, ultimately to restore permanent control over paralysed leg muscles, without the need for the bridge.

“Movement has always been very important for me because of my love of sport,” explains Courtine, who is an avid rock climber and extreme sports fan. “This is why I decided to study how the brain controls movement.”

Courtine has already proved his spinal bridge can work. Using the system, he recently helped seven long-term paraplegic men to stand and walk short distances on crutches. The patients can turn the bridge on and off using a personalised voice control, although they have no voluntary control over the signals it sends.

Brian Gitta, 26, Uganda
About 220 million people worldwide will suffer the scourge of malaria this year and nearly half a million – mostly children – will die from it. But if Ugandan IT specialist Brian Gitta succeeds in delivering his potent new technology, those numbers will fall.

The key to successfully treating malaria is fast diagnosis. Current tests require a blood sample, a microscope and a highly trained analyst – all of which are not always available in the developing world – but Gitta and his team have developed a portable electronic device – the Matiscope – that gives a reliable reading in less than two minutes, without drawing blood. This new test offers a significant advantage in speed and convenience, given that the microscopy test takes 30 minutes or longer, and blood samples may need to be sent to a laboratory in a distant town.

Gitta has a strong personal stake in the outcome: every person in his thinkIT team has suffered from the debilitating mosquito-borne blood disease.

According to the World Health Organization, 15 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia carry almost 80 per cent of the global malaria burden. Five countries account for nearly half of all malaria cases: Nigeria (25 per cent), Democratic Republic of the Congo (11 per cent), Mozambique (5 per cent), India (4 per cent) and Uganda (4 per cent). Worldwide, 61 per cent of malaria fatalities are among children.

Krithi Karanth, 50, India
As world population surges towards 8 billion, conflicts between people and the planet’s dwindling wildlife over food, resources and space for living are multiplying – but conservationist Krithi Karanth is proving that this is a problem that can be mitigated.

In her home country, India, every year there are hundreds of thousands of cases where communities and wildlife, such as leopards, tigers and elephants, clash. The result is damage, injury and death on both sides.

The Indian government hands out over US$5 million in compensation to farmers and villagers for wildlife damage every year, but Karanth estimates the 80,000 cases compensated may only represent the tip of the iceberg of actual conflicts between people and wild animals as the government lacks the resources to process claims quickly.

The daughter of a tiger biologist and conservationist, Karanth grew up with an abiding love for India’s imperilled natural wonders: “I saw tigers and leopards by the time I was two. When I was eight years old, I was tracking tigers with my father, learning to camera trap when I was a teenager. So, I spent the first 17 years of my childhood outdoors in the wild – and I assumed this is what everybody’s childhood was like.”

She found, to her dismay, that this is far from the case. As India heads for the title of the world’s most populous nation, only five per cent of its terrain is reserved for nature – a fraction of that set aside in comparable countries. Yet, it has 70 per cent of the world’s tigers and 50 per cent of its Asian elephants.

Her approach to wildlife-human conflict is simple, based on lessons learned and proven techniques. In 2015, she established a toll-free number for villagers to call for assistance in filing for compensation when they suffer losses. Known as Wild Seve, it currently serves half a million people living in 600 villages near Bandipur and Nagarahole parks in the state of Karnataka. It has filed 14,000 claims for 6,400 families, worth US$200,000. This pragmatic approach has increased trust and reduced hostility towards wildlife in these communities.

Now Karanth wants to expand the Wild Seve project to 3 more parks and 1,000 more villages. She will use mobile technology to identify conflict hotspots that need particular focus and will field-test measures in 1,000 households in high-conflict zones, such as predator-proof sheds, alternative crops and fences, to reduce crop damage and make people and their livestock safer.

Miranda Wang, 25, Canada
Every year the world churns out 340 million tonnes of plastic, much of which ends up choking landfills, rivers and oceans and polluting the atmosphere, soil and water.

Canadian entrepreneur and molecular biologist Miranda Wang has come up with a better idea for what to do with the world’s largest waste headache – turn it into wealth using unique chemical recycling technology developed by her company BioCellection.

“We’re taking plastics that are not recyclable today,” she says. “That means there are currently no economical technologies to turn these plastics into a valuable product. So we take things like dirty plastic bags, single-use packaging materials, and we transform them into valuable chemicals which can then be used to make durable materials for products that we all love and use every day.”

The problem of plastic waste grows hourly more urgent – and costly for each passing day. In the United States, it is piling up in municipal disposal centres and landfills at a rate of 30,000 tonnes every month since China, which for the past 30 years has imported half the world’s public waste, banned imports of plastic in 2018. Currently, less than a tenth of the world’s used plastic is recycled.

Wang’s mission to solve one of the world’s greatest pollution problems began as a teenager, when she and her best friend – now business partner – Jeanny Yao visited a waste processing plant on a school excursion. That sparked their enthusiasm and, after seven years of testing one approach after another, they seem finally to have made an exciting breakthrough.

While still students, Wang and Yao persuaded the University of British Columbia to give them laboratory space. Working with more senior researchers, they discovered two plastic-eating bacteria in the nearby Fraser River. But this wasn’t the solution they wanted.

These early adventures led Wang to raise US$3.5 m in capital between 2015–2019 and establish BioCellection in Silicon Valley to pioneer fresh answers to the emerging global plastics crisis. Since then, her company has developed recycling technologies that transform soiled, contaminated and unrecyclable plastics into renewable, quality chemicals with a high value to the manufacturing industry.

September 12, 2019