Planet Hope: Finding Hope for our Planet

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Hello, it's Manveen. Today we're bringing you an episode from Planet Hope, a podcast from The Times in partnership with Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative. In this special episode of Planet Hope, Adam Vaughn, Environment Editor at The Times, reflects on the insights shared in the series about the future of our planet.

From the individuals trying to find solutions to the challenges that we face, the explorers, naturalists and conservationists who are ensuring a brighter future for planet Earth. Planet Hope is brought to you by The Times in partnership with Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative. Hans Wylstoff, the founder of Rolex, used the world as a testing ground for his watches, sending them to the most extreme locations, supporting 20th century explorers in their quest for discovery.

As the 21st century unfolds, Rolex continues the legacy of its founder, supporting the explorers of today on their new mission to make the planet perpetual. Each project is evaluated according to its history, results, and the potential to make a significant contribution to the preservation of the planet and our life on Earth.

Rolex's selection process includes peer review, internal assessment and interviews. The Earth is dependent on the individuals and organisations committed to finding solutions to preserve our home. If not for us, then for future generations. And with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, we're one step closer to a planet with this hope. Discover more about the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative on Rolex.org.

Hello, I'm Adam Vaughan, the Environment Editor for The Times, and this is Planet Hope in a Partnership with Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative. On Planet Hope, we've been exploring solutions for protecting the planet and to benefit humanity. We talk to the scientists, campaigners, entrepreneurs and conservationists who've been establishing ways to change the world for the better.

So over the next hour, we're going to take you across countries and continents, from the highest peaks of Peru, to the deep depths of the ocean's twilight zone, to speak with trailblazers who Rolex has supported for over a century. And there are common themes that have emerged in our interviews, how exploring the oceans has led to new urgency in saving its marine life and the sea's essential biosystems, and how saving forests means working with local communities.

Together, we've outlined some of the most effective ways to harbour sustainability when it comes to the essentials of life, food, water and clothing. And we also learn how to understand our world so much better by simply listening more to nature. One of the areas on our planet where we're seeing the detrimental impact of human activity is on our oceans.

oceans spanning over 70% of Earth's surface serve as a life source, providing oxygen, sustenance and regulating our climate.

Yet escalating human activities threaten this vital ecosystem. With only 8.2% of the ocean currently protected, the call for action is clear. Sylvia Earle, the acclaimed ocean explorer, scientist, conservationist and Rolex testimony, has been at the heart of strengthening the protection of our oceans. And yet, as she told me, unchecked human activity now threatens this vital ecosystem. But there's still time.

There is still hope, as our global network of hope spots are transforming ocean conservation. I want democratized access to the sea so we can understand who lives there and how their lives and ours come together. So that was my wish to ultimately ignite public support, to care for the ocean, to have the equivalent

of places in the sea, like national parks, to understand why the ocean matters, hope spots large enough to save and restore the blue heart of the planet, the ocean. For me, Earth is a hope spot.

I mean, it is. All of it. And now the nation's coming together just recently to say at least 30% of the land and sea by 2030, we must safeguard nature because we need to safeguard ourselves. And nature is the solution. It's the engine that keeps Earth safe.

We started with a dozen places, and now we are asking people globally to say, what places matter to you? Where are you willing to make a commitment to go from wherever a place is, place-based, like a national park and area?

that you're willing to say, we're going to safeguard it with the best of our ability, through our actions, our community, organizations to come together. And now we have more than 160 areas around the world, like a network of hope, of people, communities, science-based conservation, because it's not just about arbitrary places. We want to have some evidence of why this place matters.

Some places are small, like Fish Rock of the western coast of Australia. It's kind of smallish. Sargasso Sea, it's kind of biggish with a number of nations coming together, but anchored in the champions in Bermuda, where

Sargasso Sea Alliance is really looking to find ways to collaborate, to safeguard this big floating rainforest of the sea infused with forms of life that occur only in those forests of Sargasso, nowhere else, and we're working to characterize each of these areas with story maps.

working with Esri, the GIS-based organization, to understand the nature of who lives there, and to have evidence, physical, chemical, to characterize the nature of each of these areas, and to look for the connections. Like where are all of the coral reefs within this network? Where are the cultivars? Who has whale sharks? Who has great white sharks?

And then we can communicate problems, solutions to connect the kids across this network of hope. Sylvia is a trailblazer in ocean conservation. Her organization, Mission Blue, strives to serve as a beacon of hope for marine health. And in Sylvia's own words, aims to secure a future where the blue heart continues to beat with life. With a lifetime dedicated to ocean exploration and conservation, Sylvia stands as a symbol of hope for our planet's oceans.

Following Sylvia's pursuit to protect the Earth's seas is a young ocean advocate who dwells on a tiny island in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean.

an organization dedicated to help save coral reef ecosystem around the planet. And I'm talking to you today from Moria, a piece of paradise. It's far from every big metropolitan city, but it's like volcano that did their airroop share in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, creating a unique biosphere. We have a wonderful underwater escape with sharks, stingrays, it's water everywhere, basically.

Marine environmentalist and entrepreneur, Tito and Bernacotte, is advocating something he calls coral gardening. Coral reefs are some of the most diverse and vibrant ecosystems on our planet, occupying less than 0.1% of the ocean floor. Coral reefs are home to a quarter of all marine life.

and play a crucial role in protecting coastlines. However, over the last three decades, the world has lost half of its reefs, from a combination of climate change, ocean acidification, overfishing, and pollution. Tituan grew up watching the coral reef's bleach, and now, with the help of the coral reef gardeners, which she set up in 2017,

He and his team are saving their back garden and providing a solution to save reefs around the world. You know, coral reef, they are like the rainforest of the sea. They are home for thousands of marine species. They are like the most biodiverse ecosystem on the planet. And inside the coral reef, the main thing you can find are corals, you know.

and here in the tropical region you have tropical corals that are normally in the shallow water where there is a lot of lights. They are doing the photosynthesis so they need lights and the right parameters to grow but it's really like plants on land you know they are not home for birds

They are home for fish and a lot of different marine species. And so gardening corals, coral gardening, as we call it, is quite a similar process as what you do on land. You are going to choose some fragments of corals that you are going to fragment with a coral clipper. When you do this, you will be able to remove the dead part, only keep a healthy, colorful part of the corals. And then you're going to be able to put them in coral nurseries

during a period of 12 to 18 months, almost two years sometimes, depending on the species we work with. And then when they reach maturity, we outplant them back onto a damage reef so that we can restore the entire ecosystem and plant more resilient corals that are going to attract the smaller fish, the bigger one, and bring back all the balance of the ecosystem here. I am still very hopeful.

for the future of our planet. You know, sometime right now with the bleaching, you can be a bit scared, but then you see some interesting array of hope in the field where you see some of the coral you planted a couple years ago. They are really good at recovering. And also when you go to talk to the kids, you know, every week we welcome some of the local island kids

here and they know so much already way more than me when i was 18 years old so and they all want to become some kind of color gardeners or scientists basically they want to do something more meaningful where at the end of the day you can you can be proud and happy of what you did for yourself and for the planet so

Me, I still have a lot of hope because I see how smart our people on this planet are. And when we see a cute dolphin, we all react the same way, you know, we all have, we are all the same. We are human and we want to see good things. People want to do good. It's just there's not enough way to do it. So we just need to come back to the basics and to be happy living with nature in some way.

Further below the waves are some of the most important marine areas you've most likely never heard of. The ocean's twilight zones are home to marine life yet to be discovered, an integral to carbon sequestration, the absorption and sealing away of dangerous CO2 pollution. Ocean explorer Lewis Rucker in San Francisco has led pioneering diving expeditions to the depths of our ocean and is now safeguarding these areas for the future of our planet.

At the moment, research-wise, I'm studying deeper coral reefs. So a lot of people know what coral reefs are. A lot of people dive on them. They're those beautiful, tropical ecosystems, very shallow in the oceans. What a lot of people don't know is that they extend a lot deeper than what you think. So if you're a recreational scuba diver, you dive to about 100 feet, 150 feet. So that's 30, 45 meters. The reefs themselves, they extend all the way down to 120, 150 meters. So that's 400, 500 feet.

So, interestingly enough, when I started doing this work, this was one of the first things we tried to understand, to analyze. Because up until 20 years ago, a lot of people thought that those deeper reefs were intact refuges for shallow reefs ecosystems. Shallow reefs are being destroyed by a number of different reasons. The number one threat right now is climate change that is warming the waters too much, so it's really destroying the shallow reefs.

In a lot of people thought that because the reefs extend to those depths to 150 meters, 500 feet, a lot of people thought that the deep proportion of the reef was safe and that it would potentially recolonize the shallows when the conditions came back to normal or whenever species adapted to the new conditions.

So that's one of the first things we wanted to see if it was actually happening. And when we started diving at those depths, the first thing we noticed was that everything was different. So even if they are safe, they wouldn't recognize the shallows because they're different, right? It's different species. And the more we looked at it, the more we saw a lot of human impacts even at those depths. So we see the number one threat now to coral reefs is coral bleaching.

We see coral bleaching at depth, too. A lot of people thought there was no coral bleaching at depth because the water is colder. But the corals at depth are used to cold the water. And for corals in general, the absolute temperature of water doesn't matter. What matters is the variation in temperature.

So if the surface is at 28 degrees Celsius and it goes up to 29 in the coral's bleach, if at 150 meters is at 22 Celsius and it goes up to 23, the coral's bleach. So it doesn't need to go all the way to 29 for them to bleach. So we see bleaching at those depths. We don't know the magnitude of bleaching because we're not looking at it as often as we do in the shallows. But we do see overfishing. We see a lot of fishing lines. We see a lot of human pollution.

trash. It's one of the saddest emotions I have in those dives. And it's really like a huge swing of emotion because you go down to a place like that where nobody dives in. You were 100% the first person to look at that reef. You find a new species and then you look to the side and you see a plastic bag or a frying pan or a can. And that's like in every single dive I can tell you I've seen

traces of human presence. But I am hopeful because even with that, even with the temperature change, even with everything, I still see signs of hope everywhere I go. For example, Bikini Atoll. So Bikini Atoll is the atoll in the Marshall Islands where the US detonated multiple nuclear bombs as tests, including Castle Bravo is the largest nuclear detonation ever done by humans.

It was 1957, and it was a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima. It was unexpected. The explosion was so big that there was radioactive, pulverized coral that rained on islands 150 miles from Bikini, from the explosion. So it was a massive, massive explosion by any measure. And I dove there.

On Bravo Crater, I dove on the crater where this explosion happened, not in 1957, I dove there in 2006, so 49 years after the explosion. It was on the most beautiful reefs I've ever seen. Sharks everywhere, corals everywhere. The key there was it was to keep people out for 50 years.

So we've kept people out for 50 years. Nobody touched that reef for 50 years, although it's still off limits. Because of the effects of radiation, the corals recovered. Even with the lingering effects of radiation, corals are doing very well there. I'm not saying that that's the solution for every place to keep humans out for 50 years. It was for bikini, but that's why we do science. We do science to figure out what the best solution is for the best places. And then when we figure that out, that gives us hope for reefs.

from the depths of the oceans to lush rainforests now as we turn to primate conservation biologist Inzakoni.

In Cote d'Ivoire, the Tanui E Forest stands as one of West Africa's last untouched rainforests, a refuge for incredible and unique flora and fauna. Despite boasting the highest biodiversity in West Africa, relentless human activities have left a mere 2% of Cote d'Ivoire's forests untouched. But this hasn't defeated Inza, who is safeguarding the Tanui E Forest.

Despite a diverse hotspot, shelters nearly 785 bird species, over 320 mammals and an estimated 9,000 vascular plants, making it a conservation priority due to its endangered primate populations. Together, Inza and his team of local experts are restoring the balance between nature's resilience and human activity by offering hope to the endangered wildlife and surrounding communities that thrive in the Tanui E. Forest.

what we do at local level as global implications, because we are preventing the loss of some market species. The market species do not occur anywhere else, but in the Tanue A forest. If you lose the Tanue A forest, this market will be driven to a station in the white.

I would say humanity would lose a part of its biodiversity. It's also our global implications in terms of vice-again climate change. This is a global challenge. But this global challenge will benefit from local actions, like the one that we are doing for the Tanoa forest, which is a huge carbon sink. As a strength forest, the carbon stock that we measured is just about vegetation biomass.

Only that, if we take into account the mud, that can also secrete, yes, higher amounts of carbon. So the carbon stock or the time of year for this should be certainly three times. I would say more important as what we've measured so far, talking about 1 million tons of carbon every year.

It has global implications, definitely. And for this reason, I think international collaborations should be key to maintaining such an asset for sustainable development, not only for CODI War, but globally speaking.

Equally important for biodiversity are the ancient Andean forests in South America. The high Andes are one of the most important biodiversity hotspots in the world, but without urgent intervention, this landscape in its surrounding natural beauty will be lost. At the forefront of a transformative movement to restore ancient forests in the Andes is a visionary conservationist leading the charge. My name is Konstantino Aukachutas. It's much better to call me Tino or Yasantino.

I'm in the president of a association with the Sandinos and actually Medina, based in Peru. At the moment, we are managing a large prong of restoration. We are trying to do this in the main watershed along all the Andes, and also protecting the main watershed to secure the water biodiversity, landscape, and, of course, the culture.

We are planting millions of trees, and we are going to do that along. We need the local communities working with us to achieve this goal. Constantino Alcatutas works closely with local communities to restore ancient cloud forests on the Andean mountain ridge, which play a vital role in the fight against climate change. It's very unique, this forest, because it has some type of mixed forest where there are a lot of endemates.

and also a lot of biodiversity. Most of the hot spots or key KBA areas are on this area, where it's concentrate all these rare species and endemic species. Polylepis means many skins. They are a sponge, a sponge of water, and the bark has many like layers of skin. It's going to be only humid, they're going to capture the mist.

And if it's going to be the rain, also it's going to capture rain. These guys work like reservoirs of water, because they are catching the water during the rainy season, and later they are going to live slowly, just feeding the valleys. This whole works, this is magnificent. Our program is for conservation. If you visit some day, a Polylepis forest, or the Highland native forest in this Andean areas,

The trees never grows in that formula that normally they planted the exotic trees. They are more compact. Sometimes you can never pass into the forest. Because in that way, they can create the microclimate or the habitat for everything that we are trying to protect and also for securing the water. Constantino is not alone in his plight to restore parts of South America like the Andes.

My name is Chris Tompkins. I'm the president and co-founder of Tompkins Conservation. We work on large-scale conservation largely in Chile and Argentina, and we rewild bring back species that have been extrepated or are extincted, or whose numbers are low and fragile. And I'm the former CEO of Patagonia Company.

Argentina, the second largest country in South America, and Chile, stretching from Antarctic waters in the south to the Atacama Desert in the north. Both countries boast exceptional beauty and biodiversity. However, decades of exploitation have taken their toll. Expansive lands have been lost to ranching, forests to come to logging, and species like Jaguars, teetered on the brink of extinction from hunting.

But in the 1990s, the trajectory of life in these countries reorientated, as Chris Tompkins, known now as one of the most successful conservation philanthropists in recent history, embarked on a remarkable career pivot, committing her life to making this corner of the world wilder.

Rewilding is acquiring sort of a canvas, enough territory that ancient Earth can recuperate on its own. And where it's impossible, where that's impossible, you step in and you help either bring back grasslands or forests, restoration work, or in terms of mammals

And well, all species help bring them back. And in some cases, these species have been gone for up to 150 years, but they can come back. We work with 24 species altogether.

Chris has committed free decades to protecting and restoring wild beauty and biodiversity by creating national parks, restoring wildlife, inspiring activism and fostering economic vitality as a result of conservation. With the help of her late husband Douglas Tonkins, they have protected approximately 15 million acres of parklands in Chile and Argentina.

Through her work, Chris aims to effectively confront the largest loss of biodiversity in history resulting from human actions, stressing the importance of returning both land and water back to the wildlife that calls these spaces home.

I think hope is only earned when we inform ourselves about the truth, whether it's local, regionally, nationally, internationally, and that you get out the front door and you go do whatever it is that you can to try to mitigate that on any level. Because again, in the absence of that, who are we when we know what's taking place?

now and the urgency and the tragedy of it. What does it mean to be human if we are not willing to jump into the fray? Staying with natural landscapes and now on the other side of the world, when perhaps less known, is the importance of the rainforests of India.

situated just 55 kilometres from the Arabian Sea. The Agumbae holds one of the last surviving lowland rainforests.

However, after years of logging and hunting of native reptiles, the rainforest, which plays a crucial role key to India's rain patterns, is under threat. Despite the pressures that the Agambay faces, there's been one man who's dedicated his life's work to the conservation of the rainforest, and its flagship species, the King Cobra. Herpetologist and conservationist Romulus Whitaker.

I'm Romulus Whitaker, known as a snake man, but I deal in crocodiles and all sorts of reptiles, and basically their conservation.

A herpetologist is someone who studies reptiles and amphibians, and that of course runs the whole dammit. The amphibians include Sicilians, which are legless amphibians, frogs and toads, many, many, many species. And of course amongst the reptiles, the turtles, tortoises, and lizards, and crocodilians, and of course snakes.

To Romulus, there's nothing greater and more mysterious than a forest. Except maybe a forest after weeks and weeks of rain. This forest gets the highest rainfall in South India on an average of 7 meters, that's over 20 feet of rainfall in the three or four months during the monsoon. And one year we got 11 meters, over 30 feet of rain.

Now, you're talking about a wet forest, okay, but you've got to see it to believe it. You've got to experience it to believe it. You know about leeches, of course, and the leeches love the place, and they love humans, of course, because we've got all this bare skin, and they love our blood. Yeah, so my first experiences there were a little bit uncomfortable,

But, you know, they're a magnificent forest, and the biodiversity is just unparalleled, and you can't just walk a couple of steps through the forest without seeing something brand new, something you've never experienced, and the smells. I mean, you rub your hands on the bark of a tree, and you have this incredible smell of licorice or something sweet, like honey. Everything that you see in the forest was, well, to me, at that time, was brand new, and it was very, very exciting, and still is very exciting.

Famous in India for his unconventional approach to conservation, American-born Romulus Whitaker, who jokingly calls himself a rabid hippie conservationist, has made his mark in his adopted country, first for his notable career in her pathology, and now for saving rainforests to help overcome India's water shortage. His plan is to help establish several research stations that will connect key remaining rainforest strongholds throughout India

and demonstrate the importance of their water supplies to hundreds of millions of people. In addition to hosting dozens of scientists and naturalists, each station's mission is to be a springboard for local conservation and the education of school children about the forest.

Studying in the forest is tough. You spend a long hard day doing work in the forest. You need a good place to rest. You need to eat someplace to write up your notes and if possible, a little laboratory to do your work. And that's what we provide. What we started out

On a very small scale is now developing into what I hope will become a much bigger rainforest laboratory. I'm optimistic in that sense, but at the same time, everyone has to get into it and get on board this. It's the role for everybody. It's not just the guys who are called conservationists, it's everybody's role.

A crucial question, which experts time and time again stress the importance of when it comes to conservation work, is how do you involve the local communities to ensure sustainability? Meet Delica Riardini-Flesch. Happiness is really not about what you get or what you have, but it's about being able to contribute and being part of something bigger.

Denika is the founder and CEO of Sakachita, an award-winning social enterprise that's aiming to change lives in Indonesia by evolving the textile industry into a powerhouse for sustainable development. Denika joined us at the Royal Geographical Society in London, in front of a live audience, where she explained the importance of human fashion and how it impacts local Indonesian villages and the environment.

So Suka Chita is actually a farm to closet fashion brand that works to end the exploitation of women while regenerating our planet. But my background to it is completely different to what I'm doing now. Of course,

You know, when you see it from the outside, so Kuchita is about the clothes and about the fashion, but my background had nothing to do with it. I'm actually a development economist by training. I initially returned to Indonesia, my home country, to work with the World Bank, where I was a development consultant and working a lot with rural development. Unfortunately, I felt like I wasn't having the kind of direct impact.

that I wanted to have through my work. And that led me on a journey to go through villages across Indonesia, where for the first time in my life, I saw how clothes are being made. It was beautiful seeing these women making fabrics with their hands. But I couldn't help to notice their struggle.

Women like Ibulilik, the person next to me in this picture, who would work 10 hours a day, but then worry every night about how she can pay for her children's school fees. And that really opened my eyes. It was the first time I realized that behind what we wear, our women will never meet, whose lives are impacted by our choice.

And it seems that there are millions of women just like her. In fact, 98% of women who make your clothes don't even earn a living wage. The industrial production of clothing is said to be responsible for up to a tenth of global carbon dioxide emissions, water pollution, habitat loss from deforestation and conversion of grasslands.

The detrimental impacts from fast fashion companies seem endless, but through social enterprises like Sakhachita, we're starting to see proven methods that guarantee the origin, ethical practices and sustainability in the textile industry. I think hope has become sort of like a dirty word in today's time because it has this connotation of you look at things from this rose-tinted glass so you're not really being realistic.

I've come to learn that it is really not about being a pessimist or an optimist. It is about being an actionist. Hope without action dies. We turn from the oceans, from the forests, to one of the other essentials of hope and life, drinking water. Even for countries with natural water resources, water scarcity is not uncommon.

But for those who live in remote and poverty-struck areas of the world, water scarcity can be the difference between life and death. And with reports suggesting that by 2025, half of the world's population could be living in areas facing water scarcity. Is there a way for science to provide a simple, sustainable solution? Kenya entrepreneur, Beth Koighi, is committed to providing access to water for those in need of her innovative solution, harvesting drinking water from the air itself.

So M-A-J-I means water in Swahili and K stands for Kuvuna in Swahili. So basically the name magic means water harvesting. So magic water specializes in air-to-water technologies. So we have systems that harvest water from the atmosphere. The systems range from 25 liters of water per day for households.

Our largest is 500 litres of water per day devices and mostly we work in arid and semi arid regions, regions that face physical water scarcity.

Countries such as Kenya face multifaceted challenges due to water scarcity, when water sources dwindle, communities struggle to access enough for drinking, sanitation and agricultural needs. This scarcity not only stunts economic growth, but also fosters unsanitary conditions, leading to deadly waterborne diseases running rife.

In regions with hot arid climates like rural Kenya, the problem is only intensified with inadequate infrastructure and lack of groundwater. Judicial solutions like rain catchment tanks and deep wells often fall short in these areas, adding pressure to an already dire situation. Technologies such as BEF's magic water could provide an innovative solution to address water scarcity in these challenging environments.

So that's exactly like a dehumidifier or ania conditioner. So basically we condense water vapour. So we take, you know, a lot of air into these condensing units and then we condense the water vapour. So I'll give you a simple example. You know when you have a glass of very cold water in a very hot day, you see at the edges of that glass, there's water that forms.

So it's when you pass air through a cold surface and you see those water droplets forming. So it's the same technique. It's basically where we are condensing the water vapour in air. So we collect that in droplets and then we feel a tank. You know, we have a saying that a drop will feel a tank. So literally that is the same. We collect those drops to become 500 liters of water per day. Most of our installations are solar powered.

So currently we have around 2,400 users for all our system commutatively and our system are producing around 200,000 liters of water per month. And mostly we work with communities that are water stressed. Most of these communities you find them in arid and semi-arid regions. So we work with hospitals, we work with schools, most of our installations are in schools, we work with NGOs for

humanitarian projects but recently we just started doing water kiosks. This is where we established water shops in urban areas in these remote communities because people are more permanent and they live in one place for longer periods of time so that is the new model that we have started implementing.

What is as urgent as provided water is solving the blight of hidden hunger, a term used to describe a lack of micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals in a person's diet. Many areas of the world have seen little improvement in recent decades in combating hunger and malnutrition. The world's population stands at some 8 billion people, a staggering quarter of which live silently with hidden hunger every day.

In Africa alone, over a billion people struggled to afford a healthy diet, leaving a crucial question, how can hidden hunger be eliminated? Felix Brooks Church shared with us his ingenious system to eliminate hidden hunger.

So yes, we fortify food and what that means is literally making food stronger by adding critical vitamins and minerals. It's quite common here in the UK and North America and Australia where I live. Staple foods like flour, sugar, oil, all of these we take for granted that they've already had nutrients by law from the government added.

Now that works, there's decades of science that that helps to abolish what's called hidden hunger or malnutrition. But the issue is in the places that we work, most notably East Africa, that science or that proven industrial fortification doesn't have the reach, doesn't have the impact.

So our job is to basically expand what we know works here over there to people that need it most. Do you? And people will know what malnutrition is, but you just mentioned this phrase, hidden hunger. What does that mean? I'm not a nutritionist. There's a lot of learning I've done over the last 10 years about this critical issue. And prior to getting into this work, I wasn't aware how big of an issue this was.

So malnutrition affects and hidden hunger affects one in four people, that's two billion people globally. And the result of that, unfortunately, is 8,000 children dying every single day from preventable sickness and illness. So it's this huge thing that isn't often talked about or not talked about enough.

And so when you think about malnutrition, you can think about it on a spectrum, on two extremes. On one extreme, not having enough food will cause malnutrition, literally starvation. And you can have that image of what that looks like, especially with a child. And then on the other side of that spectrum, rather, there's too much nutrition over nutrition, obesity. And that's something very common you can see, especially in the UK and North America. But sitting right in the middle of those two extremes is what's called hidden hunger.

People might have enough food, but they might not have enough of the colorful things on their plate. Their bellies are full, but full bellies aren't enough. They're starving literally from the lack of vitamins and minerals. And so this is very evident in the places we work in East Africa. The common staple food consumed by literally everybody is a maize porridge from corn or maize. It's a big, starchy thing that fills your belly and you go to work and you feel like you've got the energy, but you don't have the vitamins and minerals. You don't have the zinc, the folic acid, iron, the things that we need.

And so that causes hidden hunger, which causes weak immune systems, stunting lots of health issues. So we're literally putting these safe, proven nutrients back into the staple food as a vehicle to reach a lot of people. Recognizing our planet's vulnerabilities and finding solutions to protect it takes ingenuity, skill, and as we're about to hear, often a great deal of tenacity.

Paul Nicklin is a conservation photographer who has used his lens to document the planet and its evolution over the last three decades, aiming to protect and preserve the natural world with a single click. The visual stories he captures of animals in the natural world serve as urgent cause to action. And finally, people are listening.

Frequently working alongside scientists, fellow conservationists, oceanographers, and indigenous communities such as the Inuit, the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, Paul translates what they see in far-flung places into visual stories and in turn captures the attention of millions and sometimes billions of people around the world.

I always say, everything I do is at that intersection of art, science and conservation. It has to be beautiful, powerful, creative visual reaction. It has to be based on science and fact, and then you can have that conversation on conservation. For Paul, his passion lies not just in taking stunning photographs, but capturing impactful images of our changing planet that help to educate the world on how threats like habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and climate change are having devastating impacts on the future of our planet.

what he does is well known. Perhaps less well known is the risks he takes to do it.

I did a big story on an expose and sort of an undercover story about the ivory trade of narwhals. That was a really heavy hitting expose journalism piece. You know, I grew up there. I grew up with, you know, and I grew up on thin ice. As kids, we would run across thin ice till we fell into the ocean, you know. So I just so comfortable in that environment. But I was up there with the internet every year trying to get pictures of narwhals. You see very few pictures of narwhals. My mentor, Flip Nicklin, had spent years up there and had a couple of nice shots.

So now I've pitched this big story and I'm failing. I'm failing year after year and I'm not getting the shots in narwhals. And so I finally learned that I could get an ultralight airplane, put it on amphibious floats. I could take off from the sea ice. I brought in a friend of mine who's a really good pilot and I was flying the airplane as well. So we would take turns and

When I was shooting with the doors off, he was in the backseat flying the airplane. So on the first really good night, we're out there flying. We got carb ice all over the carburetor with the engine seized up. We almost crashed into the sea ice. We had a crash landing back at camp. We bent the floats, bent the airframe a little bit.

But the engine was toast because we blew up the crankshaft. So we ordered another engine, had it shipped overnight FedEx from Canada all the way up to where we were, and that took a month to get there. And we installed that engine. It was only on the last two days of the project that the hunters and trappers that ordered everybody off the ice. We finally got the new engine up and running. We tested it. We got up in the air.

And we saw all these narwhals. And we landed right next to a mother and cub polar bear right next to a whole were full of narwhals. But, you know, it took five years to have this one good day of shooting. The ice was so rotten. We went back to camp to fuel up the airplane. I fell through the ice, which is normally fun. You know, it's not a big deal to fall through the ice. But this time it was like two VW Beatles sized chunks of ice rolling together and I wasn't coming back.

I reached up and I grabbed a rope on my sled, dislocated my shoulder. And I'm lying in this cold icy water with a dislocated shoulder. I can't speak. Took a while for my guys to find me. It took my assistant two hours to reset my shoulder because it was so frozen. But as I winced in pain, I was just all I saw were ivory and tuss and narwhals. And I knew that we got the images to come back with the story. I ended up crashing that airplane soon after that. So I bought another airplane.

similar one better engine and I was photographing in the Yukon and I was landing on this runway shooting by myself doors off and I'm landing and my engine starts to fail again. So I shifted over to a lake left my wheels down last minute flipped upside down. Now I'm trapped inside the cockpit of the airplane, which has a 98% mortality rate.

because I've had so many diving incidents underwater. I was able to stay calm through it all, keep going up to my feet and getting a pocket of air. The wheel had come through and caught my leg and the door was all locked with rivets and bungees. So I had to bust the rivets, you know, and then crawl out through the cockpit and then, you know, the next day somebody had a similar incident and they didn't make it.

So it's just like, puts everything in perspective of like sort of how close this line you are working with. And it's like, even my close friend Carl Eric, I took the picture of that polar bear in the window. He and I rode on really rotten sea ice. I flew out. He went out with friends back onto the same sea ice the day after I left, he fell through and he didn't make it. And it's like,

you realize, and it was just tragic. So it's the biggest comment I get on people is like, I love your clicks and snaps. I just want to travel the world like you and just see the world. And I'm like, people don't know what goes into coming back with this imagery. But when you believe in a story and you have a vision for it, you just can't let it go. And you got to go chase these images that are living inside your mind.

He's truly seen it all, the light and the shade, hope and despair. When asked about how hopeful he is for our future world, he remains cautiously optimistic. The fact that we weren't even really talking about climate change 25 years ago and the fact that we're all talking about it now, we're actually really taking actions on it. It's becoming a new badge of honor for politicians to tie it to their portfolio. Overall, it's easy to get negative, but overall, I am hopeful because I see

A shift happening in the right direction is happening too slow. It's not big enough. There should be huge cries of panic and warning bells should be going off everywhere. I'm really scared, but hope is the only emotion greater than fear, and I'm just sick of being fearful. And I'm just going to hang on to hope. And it's the only way I can lead the next generation of photographer, storytellers, conservationists is to find hope and to chase that and to fuel your energy through life with that hope.

Hearing from pioneering explorers like Paul Nicklin has without a doubt exemplified the inspirational work that individuals across the world are doing to give the future of our planet hope. But it's not just the experts which inspire hope, it's nature itself.

Michelle Andre is a renowned bioacoustic scientist who believes in reconnecting to nature through sound. If you want to understand and save the world, then he argues you need to listen to the world. Just as humans depend on sound for survival and expression, animals too rely on audit recues to navigate their environments. However, nature is increasingly disrupted by human generated noise.

from roaring engines to clanking machinery, disturbing the delicate balance of sound in the natural world. Michelle strives to restore the balance of human-generated noise and wildlife survival.

Noise pollution is this pollution that comes from human activity. That is not something that was present in the oceans for all the human history. So we created and produced massively these sources of noise pollution in the ocean around 80 years ago. When we didn't know, not only that the ocean was not silent, when we speak about silent ocean, we speak about the dead ocean. So the ocean has never been silent. It has always been filled

with natural sounds coming from wave, earthquakes, etc. and with biological sounds. And this has always been in the water and this is the way all the inhabitants of the ocean live and the survival of the ocean goes through the sounds that it produces.

The problem is that as human beings, we don't have this capacity to hear underwater. We can perceive a few parameters of the sound, but it's very faint. And we overthought that the ocean was silent. I was saying this is all the country. And then this richness of and this diversity of sounds that make the ocean alive

has been affected for the last eight years with this man-man noise that again for eight years we had no idea that this sound could even be affecting wildlife and could kill our life and noise pollution kills wildlife and we are speaking about not only whales, dolphins but also invertebrates, fish and plants so there is nothing in the ocean that is preserved

From this human activity sound, we're speaking about, of course, shipping. We are speaking about oil and gas operation, windmill construction and operation. All these activity at sea produce sound and this is affecting badly the communication capability, not only of the whales, but of the whole of the ocean. Sound is crucial for the survival of wildlife.

Michelle's work, analysing sound in oceans, unraveled the huge impact human noise has on marine life. Despite sperm whales being the loudest mammal on Earth, using elaborate buzzes, clicks and squeaks to communicate,

An increase in underwater noise pollution from human sources has limited the space to enable their communication. And as a result, whales cannot hear each other or interpret other signals in their environment, which leads to devastating repercussions. It's estimated that shipping cruises and fishing vessels fatally strike around 20,000 whales around the world every year.

With Michelle's technology and network of sound observations, it's possible to better safeguard Wales against human interference and a whole range of other wildlife across the globe. So the initial idea that continues is to understand this interaction between artificial noises and

these biological noises and how we can cohabitate. This is the most important to me, is that if we don't understand the role of these sounds and how the interaction with artificial sounds takes place, then we won't have a way to cohabitate with nature, which is our vital move now. We need really to understand as quick as we can how to cohabitate with nature because otherwise we will not be able to survive.

on the planet. So, listening to this sound, understanding this interaction is a vital aspect. All this information has a purpose of not only understanding, but also to regulate these effects. I am very hopeful. We know that now we have the data, we have the knowledge, the CVRL doesn't stop to say this, now we have the knowledge that we didn't have in the past, so we need to use this knowledge fast, apply it to make a change, and we can do it. Bioacoustics Engineer, Michelle Andre.

We also heard from the oceanographers, deep sea divers and coral gardeners, the experts preserving forest environments to rewilders, conservationists and even herpetologists, the entrepreneurs eliminating hidden hunger and shortages of drinking water, not to mention the activists and visionaries who are collectively safeguarding the future of our planet. This has been a special episode of Planet Hope brought to you by the times in partnership with Rolex and its perpetual planet initiative.

If you enjoyed what you heard, you can hear the interviews in full with all these inspirational figures by following Planet Hope wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Adam Vaughn, Environment Editor for The Times. Thank you for listening.

Planet Hope is brought to you by The Times in partnership with Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative. For nearly a century, Rolex has championed pioneering explorers who have shed light on the world and pushed the boundaries of human endeavor. Today's explorers are no exception, but they have a new focus to make the planet perpetual.

The Earth wants a playground for discovery, now needs our help to protect and preserve the natural world. Rolex supports the individuals and organisations who are protecting our world and inspiring generational hope as a part of its commitment to a perpetual planet. Discover more about the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative on Rolex.org.

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