Original subtitles

How many people over the years have looked at the moon

and longed to visit?

This sight is one of the few experiences that all of us,

all around the world share.

Over the centuries, it must have inspired a lot of dreamers.

Little wonder that as soon as the moon fell within reach,

we grasped for it.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,

not because they are easy, but because they are hard,

because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept,

one we are unwilling to postpone and one we intend to win.

And director of flight to operations...

To what became known as his "Moonshot" in 1962,

President Kennedy set out a dream so outrageous and ambitious,

it demanded unparalleled, urgent innovation

and effort from a huge multinational team.

..two, one, zero. We have commenced. We have lift off.

And when the Moonshot was accomplished within the decade,

it was a success that inspired people across the world.

A defining achievement of human history.

But its greater lasting impact was one that few in 1962 could foresee -

the view back from up there.

In reaching for the moon, we found the Earth.

For the first time, we could see that the world we live on

is finite and precious.

Ultimately, it woke us to a distressing truth

we are still trying to come to terms with.

The modern world we have built is at odds with the planet we live on.

It's come to this, our planet is now in crisis,

its delicately balanced systems are becoming more and more unstable

with every passing year.

So for the sake of future generations, let's act now.

Let's take inspiration from the Moonshot

and set ourselves a global challenge for this decade,

a common goal to unite behind,

to mend our broken relationship with our planet

and build a better future for all.

It is for this very reason that I launched the Earthshot Prize,

the most ambitious environmental prize in history.

Each year, until 2030, we will award five £1 million prizes

to those who we believe can transform our chances

of repairing our planet within the decade.

Five prizes because experts tell us there are five great challenges

we must urgently overcome to turn the tide.

Over the next ten years,

we MUST work hard to protect and restore nature

so that the wild stops shrinking and starts to grow...

..fix our climate to stop the rising global temperature...

..clean our air so that we can all breathe healthily...

..revive our oceans to become as rich and productive

as they once were...

..and we must build a waste-free world

by ensuring the waste of one process

becomes the raw materials of the next.

As we work on these five Earthshots,

the science tells us they will help each other.

In restoring nature, we will help fix the climate.

In removing waste, we will help revive our oceans.

To help me in this extraordinary undertaking,

I've gathered together a group of remarkable experts, influencers

and environmentalists -

the Earthshot Prize Council.

In this series, I will join some of the prize council members

in exploring the five Earthshots, one by one.

We will discover the key problems we face...

..introduce you to people already working on solutions...

..and finally, I'll tell you about the new projects

we've shortlisted for this year's prize.

This is a moment for hope, not fear.

A better sustainable future is within reach.

We just have to grasp for it.

We humans can achieve anything we set our minds to.

It's one small step for a man...

..one giant leap for mankind.

So let's all set our minds to this,

a decade of action to repower our planet.

There's no time to waste.

On with the first of our five Earthshots.

Here to tell the story of how we can stop working against nature,

and start working with it,

is one member of our Earthshot Prize Council -

Sir David Attenborough.

I've spent my life learning about the natural world

and our place within it.

In doing so, I've been lucky enough to see more of the wonders of nature

that I could ever have dreamt of doing.

I've seen the greatest migrations...

..travelled alongside the largest animals that ever lived...

..encountered our closest relatives...

..and been dazzled by the beauty of nature.

And I've tried to share much of these experiences

with audiences around the world.

But now our planet is a lot less wild than it was

when I began my travels.

Here in the British Isles, over the centuries,

we've long since turned our natural wildernesses

into a tamed, orderly landscape.

The same is happening right now across the globe.

And this has consequences.

A less wild world is a less stable world.

And that is a world less able to support all species,

including ourselves.

That's why I agreed to join the Earthshot Prize Council.

We CAN protect and restore the natural world,

and as we do so, we start to bring stability to our planet.

Before we can understand what's going wrong,

we need to understand how the system works

when it's functioning as it should.

The natural world, of which we are an intrinsic part,

is mind boggling in its complexity...

..teeming with billions of individuals, of millions of species.

No one organism lives in isolation.

They work with others in communities called "ecosystems",

held together by countless intimate relationships.

Species may feed on one another...

..pollinate others...

..disperse seeds,

compete for mates...

..or for space in the sun.

Biologists try to sum up this remarkable variety of life

in one term -

biodiversity.

All this life evolved together over millions of years

into the resilient and stable natural communities that we see today.

We need the natural world to be diverse and thrive in this way.

That's because a thriving natural world

provides a long list of services for us, for free.

The services such as locking away vast stores of carbon

to keep the climate stable...

..keeping the water cycle moving to bring dependable rains...

..providing the world with oxygen and filtering the air we breathe,

replenishing soils and pollinating our crops...

..not forgetting all the materials,

foods and medicines that ecosystems provide.

Everything that humanity has achieved is built

on the foundation of a healthy natural world.

Without it, life as we enjoy it could not happen.

And yet, the life we now enjoy is threatening biodiversity.

This could prove catastrophic, since ecosystems are held together

by intimate relationships.

When one element is removed, the whole community may collapse.

So what, of the things we do, pose the biggest threats to biodiversity?

The island of Borneo lies across the equator...

..which means its tropical forests

have been constantly bathed in regular sunshine, heat and rain.

The perfect conditions for life to flourish.

Many species are found nowhere else...

Such is the case with the island's largest primate,

the Bornean orangutan.

In recent years, the increase of oil palm plantations

has been one of the leading causes of deforestation in Southeast Asia.

In the process, an immensely diverse ecosystem

is exchanged for lines of a single species of plant

and little other wildlife.

Over the last 50 years, Borneo has lost 30% of its tropical forests

and half of its orangutan.

The reason wild areas across the world are still being destroyed is simple.

In today's world, a wild habitat brings less financial income

than a cleared one.

We place little value on nature,

even though it is our essential life support system.

In Borneo, the felled hardwoods are worth money

and the palm oil that is then grown on the land is worth more money.

So there is double incentive to cut down the forest.

But Mislin has a different approach,

one that she wants to see rolled out across the island.

She only grows oil palm on existing farmland

which lost its native trees decades ago.

Because of this, the palm oil she produces can now be labelled

"deforestation-free".

Forest corridors help to provide safe passage

between larger patches of forest,

as well as food and homes for much of its wildlife.

To stop the complete removal of Borneo's tropical rainforests,

conservationists like Mislin are trying to change the palm oil trade.

And that means changing the entire chain

from where the oil is produced, to where it is consumed.

I'm Cat Barton, I'm a wildlife conservationist.

My journey into palm oil started in Borneo,

but I quickly realised that it was a battle

that we could also fight right here, in England.

Palm oil's found in so many different products on our supermarket shelves.

The biggest challenge is educating people

that deforestation-free palm oil exists.

Right now, only a small portion of palm oil

can be classified as deforestation-free.

But that can change, if more consumers demand it.

Cat's work has helped Chester to claim the title

of the world's first Sustainable Palm Oil City.

So far, more than 50 organisations

have made a commitment to use only sustainable palm oil.

There is so much more to do,

but we can only do that if we work collectively

with plantations on the ground, all the way through to consumers

that buy the products in the supermarket.

Although habitat loss today is most obvious in the tropical rainforests,

we need to remember that natural habitats were lost

across much of the rest of the world centuries ago.

Today, we have a manicured landscape.

We tamed our wild a very long time ago.

We don't want the same to happen elsewhere.

The conflict between humankind and the wild habitats of the world

goes back over 10,000 years to the dawn of farming.

And one source of food has had a greater impact across the world than any other.

The single largest cause of biodiversity loss

comes from the land we cleared to raise and feed livestock.

Dani Alves is the most decorated footballer in history

and has captained Brazil's national team.

Brazil produces vast amounts of beef,

and its 215 million cattle

graze an area the size of France, Spain and Germany combined.

Farming the livestock and the crops to feed livestock

is the country's leading cause of its habitat loss,

including parts of the unique Amazon rainforest.

Scientists predict that if the Amazon forest is reduced

by another 5%, it could fail to create enough moisture

to keep itself stable.

And that could trigger an unstoppable transformation

into a far less biodiverse savannah.

At current rates of deforestation,

this process could begin within the decade.

Once that change happens,

large parts of the ecosystem,

with the greatest variety of species on land,

which has existed for tens of millions of years,

could be gone forever.

In the UK, very little of our beef comes from South America,

and some farmers do raise livestock more sustainably,

such as grass-fed free ranging herds,

and livestock as part of regenerative farming.

The problem is that these methods can't provide the huge volume

of meat that humanity currently consumes.

Globally, the area we now use to rear and feed livestock

takes up land equivalent to the size of North and South America combined.

Of course, on land, this loss of the wild is obvious.

But beneath the surface of our planet's rivers and lakes,

it's surprisingly easy for changes to go unnoticed.

Travelling across the Earth's surface,

rivers play a vital role in nature's water cycle

and support their own freshwater ecosystems,

rich with species that are often unique to particular regions.

Rivers also transport minerals along their length,

feeding the plants of flood plains, marshes and deltas

with vital nutrients.

The continual flow of freshwater is essential to everything

that lives on land, including ourselves.

The Mekong River runs almost 3,000 miles

from the Tibetan Plateau to the South China Sea.

Here, straddling the border with Laos,

are 18,000 square kilometres of flooded forests -

essential nurseries for millions of fish that migrate here to spawn.

The nurseries underpin the world's largest inland fishery,

supporting the livelihoods of over 60 million people.

In 2020, Don Sahong Dam came online

close to the Laos-Cambodian border.

The Mekong River has been dammed more than many river systems -

13 hydropower dams have been built across it so far,

and many more are planned.

Hydropower can be a positive renewable source of energy,

but large dams on the main river channel can be devastating,

blocking the flow of fresh water and its nutrient-rich sediment

and creating a barrier for the migrating fish.

As more dams are built,

the spawning grounds of the flooded forests are emptying

and the world's largest inland fishery may simply collapse.

Our impact on rivers globally is staggering.

In North America alone, two-thirds of major rivers are dammed.

What's more, across the world, we extract ten billion tonnes

of fresh water every day.

Over 90% of it is used in agriculture and industry.

As a result, the flow of fresh water can falter,

threatening both the ecosystems and the people that rely on them.

The facts are clear,

the natural world is in crisis because of us.

Humanity has left its mark on almost 95% of the Earth's land surface.

In the short period since 1970,

the populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians

are thought to have declined, on average, by 60%.

We risk causing the biggest extinction event

since the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

In the face of this onslaught,

the interactions that tie species together are untied

and the planet's ecosystems fall apart.

In turn, the clean air, freshwater,

fertile soil, stable climate and foodstuffs

that the natural world provides for us will be jeopardised.

That is the reality of the road we are on.

But we can change direction.

It's not yet too late.

We need a global response to pull us back from the brink,

and we all have a part to play.

We need an Earthshot.

Fortunately, there is some cause for optimism.

Individuals, communities, companies and even governments

are finding ways to protect and restore nature

that might be rolled out across the world.

Just 20 years ago,

this land in southern England was a typical modern arable dairy farm.

But the two passionate landowners embarked on an experiment.

They decided to work with nature, rather than against it.

They stopped the spraying and fertilising,

they took down the fences between the fields,

they stocked the land with a mix of livestock

that resembled the animals that once roamed wild

in this part of the world.

They harvested some of the livestock as meat,

in effect, replacing the absent wild predators

that kept the ecosystem in balance.

They gave the natural world the chance to rebuild.

The Knepp Estate is once again home to species that were

long gone from its former ploughed fields.

Even in the British Isles,

one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world,

biodiversity can recover.

Knepp is just one small scale solution,

evidence that nature can return quickly when given the chance.

Yet, even some of the places we already consider as being wild

can do with a little help.

My name is Kira Cassidy and I'm a scientist studying grey wolves.

The Yellowstone area looks like a wonderful wilderness,

America at its wildest...

..but, in fact, until just recently, it wasn't truly wild.

In 1926, the last wolfpack in Yellowstone was wiped out.

Without its top predator,

the Yellowstone ecosystem was thrown out of balance.

Elk numbers soared,

and they overgrazed the plant life.

This had knock-on effects throughout the ecosystem,

and reduced biodiversity.

The park authority tried to manage the elk,

but even culling them wasn't enough.

It was time to bring back the wolves.

No-one had reintroduced this kind of predator in the US before.

But the wolves acted as if they'd always been here.

Right away they started hunting and forming packs.

I think I have the best job in the world.

I get to track the wolves.

And that way we can see where they're going,

but most importantly, we can find out what they're eating.

We knew they'd reduce elk and deer numbers,

but that was just a start.

With wolves about, the remaining elk and deer could no longer

stay in one place for long browsing on the trees and shrubs.

They had to keep moving.

This simple change brought about a transformation.

Berry bushes grew back,

which helped the bears.

River banks sprouted saplings like aspen and willow,

which retained the soil and changed the course of the rivers.

This helped beaver populations,

which in turn created pools that provided homes for more fish.

Moose flourished with the returning vegetation.

As did scavengers, like coyotes, foxes and eagles,

drawn to Yellowstone by the carcasses left by the wolves.

The wolves had brought order back to the entire ecosystem.

It has now been 25 years since the wolves were released,

and this area is the wildest it's been in over 100 years.

Removing wolves was a mistake,

and I think we should correct our mistakes whenever we can.

An ecosystem runs best when it has all its component parts.

This also helps another of our Earthshots,

to fix our climate,

because a healthy ecosystem means more plants growing more rapidly

and capturing more carbon from the air.

We often think about our impact on the world as being pretty negative,

but the Yellowstone reintroduction is an example of a really positive

impact that we've had on the world.

Every time I step into this wild place,

I'm reminded that the biodiversity loss we see across the whole

planet can be changed, and it can be reversed so quickly.

Sometimes we just need to give it a little helping hand.

Yellowstone was the world's first national park.

It's part of the 15% of our planet's land that is protected.

But it is publicly owned.

Most of Earth's land surface is in private hands,

which means the land has to generate income for its owners.

So, how do we make wild places more valuable

to the people that own them?

The Maasai, who occupy thousands of square kilometres

of wild savanna in East Africa, have found a solution.

A system that enables them

to earn more income the wilder their land becomes.

When I was a little child,

my grandfather told me about rhino.

To me, it was like me telling my children about dinosaurs.

It was just a story.

The rhino was gone from this place.

Cattle are central to the Maasai culture,

a vital source of both food and income.

For centuries, their cattle have roamed these areas,

coexisting with local wildlife.

But recently, as some traditional lands were fragmented or

turned into national parks,

and as the Maasai population and their herds increased,

the balance with nature was lost.

The land became overgrazed

and both the cattle and local wildlife

struggled to find enough food.

We all were suffering.

Something had to change.

The community conservancy idea is that people living on the land

are the guardians of the land.

It means coming together to agree on ways to use the area

so that humans and nature can benefit side-by-side.

It protects wildlife and our culture.

The conservancy model, first proposed by conservationists,

helps communities to create a new source of income

from the land they own.

A source that can also protect and restore the wildlife.

In this case, it was ecotourism.

I was a young boy then and I opposed it.

Not because I knew what it was, because I thought it was

another way of somebody trying to grab our land.

It took us almost two years to be convinced.

Our community came together

and built the Il Ngwesi tourist lodge,

which was the first in east Africa

and still the only one that is purely owned

and run by the community.

It overlooks the land that is now protected.

Grazing is controlled so that trees and plants have recovered

and the wild animals have come back.

The idea took hold and snowballed.

Now, other communities have built conservancies,

and wildlife can roam more of its original habitat.

As more wildlife returns, it attracts more tourists

and brings more income.

Wildlife brought us tourism, and tourism brought us jobs.

Things have changed so much in our community.

Conservation brought all of this to us.

The future generation, like my grandchildren,

will not hear about rhinos as a story,

and they will not have to pay to go and see them,

because they will be on their own land.

And they will be proud to have the most endangered

animals within their land.

As the Maasai have found, bio-diverse places,

wherever they still exist,

can become valuable to the people who look after them.

We need space to live and feed ourselves,

but we can certainly work to be more efficient

and use as little as possible...

..like some pioneering farmers in the Netherlands.

These aren't simple greenhouses.

They are super-efficient, sustainable food factories...

..just one of a pioneering group of farming businesses

that have helped this relatively small nation

to become one of the world's biggest exporters of food.

To create this much food as rapidly,

this farm, together with other farms and research labs,

use state-of-the-art technology.

From seeds in biodegradable pots to fully grown plants,

the growing cycle is entirely automated.

It's not just the Netherlands developing new,

efficient farming techniques - it's happening across the globe.

There are farms growing tomatoes without soil...

..vertical farms...

..even farms in our oceans...

..and laboratories researching

strong and efficient crops of the future.

Across the globe,

we could begin to restore an area of land larger than North America

and Brazil right now,

just by changing how we farm and what we eat.

Pioneering farms like Siberia are showing that there are

more sustainable ways of producing some fruit and vegetables en masse.

And researchers are also exploring new ways of producing

more sustainable meat from less land.

My name is Shulamit Levenberg.

I'm a professor at the Israel Institute of Technology.

Scientists around the world, including myself,

had succeeded in growing human tissue for medical research.

It's called tissue engineering.

And that was the trigger for the new direction.

One of my students asked if we could also try to grow tissue from cattle.

We thought that if we could grow cultured beef,

it might have far-reaching, positive impacts.

Cultured meat refers to the growing process.

First, small sample cells are taken from a healthy, living cow.

These are placed in a culture,

a soup of the nutrients that the cells would normally be taking

from the cow - proteins, sugars, vitamins and minerals.

In their culture, the cells grow, multiply

and connect together.

So far, this work has created a thin-cut steak

and developed the technology to make the world's first

cultured ribeye steak.

What's produced is not just similar to beef - it is beef.

Growing meat like this is really fast.

So, we take just three weeks, compared with an average

of two years using conventional methods of growing meat.

And it uses a fraction of the resources required for raising

an entire animal for meat.

It's great to see the reaction

when people try our cultured meat for the first time.

It's such a surprise.

That realisation that this is meat

but we've not killed any cows to have it.

Across the world, other companies are producing cultured eggs,

chickens and fish.

It makes me feel proud to be doing this.

We are helping give people choices that help the planet.

Cultured meat is still in its infancy

and will become cheaper

when production scales up in the near future.

And if we are able to create solutions like this,

which move us away from intensive livestock production,

it gives us hope that we can stop causing any more biodiversity loss.

There is no single solution to restoring the natural world.

Every patch of land will require its own tailored approach

so that we can both feed ourselves and increase biodiversity.

If we choose to spend the next ten years

perfecting all the new ideas we've seen,

and searching for many others,

just imagine what might be possible.

A world in which landowners gain more from building diverse,

wild habitats than destroying them...

..a world in which we can work with

rather than against natural cycles...

..a world in which we've become so efficient at providing

for ourselves that we can spare enough space

for the rest of life on Earth.

Tomorrow's world could be more diverse, more stable, more wild.

It's within our power if we start making the right choices from today.

It's clear that a thriving natural world is essential to our own

existence on Earth.

It therefore worries me deeply that nature is in decline

in so many parts of the world.

But it's entirely within our gift to turn the situation around.

We can protect and restore nature on a global scale.

And the Earthshot Prize is here to celebrate and scale

the best solutions to achieve this.

I'm delighted to be able to introduce you now

to the three finalists in the running for the first-ever

Earthshot Prize to protect and restore nature.

First, we head to the Democratic Republic of the Congo,

where the Pole Pole Foundation is helping to protect

the local population of gorillas from bush meat poaching

by encouraging people to eat a plant-based diet instead.

The numbers of the local gorilla, the Grauer's gorilla,

have more than halved since 1995.

The main cause of this decline is that they were hunted

for bush meat, and even heavy fines weren't a deterrent.

Perhaps that's not surprising in an area where many people

live in poverty and are unable to afford regular, healthy meals.

Pole Pole are providing families with an alternative source

of protein by growing a nutrient-rich blue-green algae,

called spirulina, that can be cheaply and easily produced

from little land.

It is grown in pools rich with salts and other nutrients,

then dried in the sun,

and made into a nutritious paste that is spread onto cookies.

Pole Pole is an impressive and humbling project...

..created and operated by a local team who understand all the issues.

Thanks, in part, to the work of Pole Pole,

the gorilla numbers in the local National Park are now on the rise.

With the support of the Earthshot Prize,

Pole Pole want to help in other areas where food is scarce

and wildlife is threatened...

..by teaching locals how to produce their own plant-based super foods.

Our next finalist is the Republic of Costa Rica government,

which has overseen perhaps the most successful

ecological restoration project in the world.

In the 1990s, financial incentives began to be offered to anyone

protecting and restoring the nation's heavily depleted forests.

At that moment, our economic model supported people

cutting down forests.

We've realised that, to have a healthy economy

and a healthy society, we need healthy ecosystems.

We have learned to value nature rather than take from it.

The government pays people to preserve their ecosystems,

with experts advising people on how to sustainably manage

and generate an income from their land.

The initiative has doubled forest cover in just 25 years...

..and boosted the economy through a boom in ecotourism.

This nomination will hopefully help to inspire

communities all over the world to follow in Costa Rica's footsteps.

If other countries followed what we have done,

we can not only stop tropical forest loss globally,

we can reverse it and have a healthier planet.

Our final idea is a free online resource called Restor,

which can help anyone anywhere bring back more biodiversity

to their land.

Its creator is ecologist Tom Crowther.

Restor is like a Google Maps for nature,

but instead of seeing coffee shops and restaurants,

you see conservation and restoration initiatives.

And it's underpinned by a huge amount of scientific data

that can help users to re-wild any terrestrial location on Earth.

You could be an individual wanting to re-wild your garden,

a government looking to meet carbon targets,

or a farmer trying to integrate biodiversity into your practice.

The map helps identify what native species to plant,

and can predict the amount of carbon dioxide

a rewilding project would capture.

It also connects an international network of environmentalists.

There are thousands of local initiatives across the globe,

protecting and revitalising biodiversity,

but they're doing it alone.

We need to connect an immense network of local,

sustainable projects with governments, funders and consumers.

Though still in its infancy, Restor is already helping

thousands of sites across the planet to bring back nature.

Tom and his team hope that winning the Earthshot Prize could help them

supercharge the growth of their budding global network.

Those who work to protect

and restore the natural world are doing us all a great service.

The winner of this Earthshot Prize will get investment, support

and a global platform to fully realise

the potential of their solution.

And, over the coming years, till 2030,

nine more transformational solutions for protecting

and restoring nature will receive the same.

The natural world can return with vigour if we choose to protect it.

And in return, it will protect us.

In the next episode, we will discover how,

with the story of our second great Earthshot - Fix Our Climate.

We'll learn about a community leader who triggered

the transition of a whole nation to renewables...

..meet a man capturing carbon from the atmosphere as diamonds...

..and discover other emerging innovations aiming to stop

climate change in its tracks.