A NEW GENERATION OF PLANET PROBLEM SOLVERS

A New Generation of PlanetPROBLEM

Three Rolex Laureates tell us how they are tackling some of the world's biggest problems

In 1976 Rolex’s ground-breaking Oyster watch, the world’s first waterproof watch, celebrated its 50th anniversary. To honor the stellar achievement that changed the world of watchmaking, Rolex launched a new program, the Rolex Awards for Enterprise.

The award is as singular as the watch it pays tribute to. It is given to remarkable men and women who are tackling chal-

lenges in unique, inventive ways as they attempt to solve problems such as climate change, pollution, health care, or the im-

periled state of the ocean. The award winners draw on personal reserves of enterprising and innovative spirit, the same

SOLVERS

Rolex Laureates Felix Brooks-church, Miranda Wang and Gina Moseley

qualities that Rolex prides itself on possessing.

The awards stand out for another very important reason as well—they are given to those who would not otherwise have access

to traditional fundraising, due in part to the originality and uniqueness of each winners’ pioneering visions. Nearly 1000 hopefuls

apply each year to receive the award, out of which only five are chosen.

Since its inception Rolex has awarded 155 exceptional winners. Here are three of the awardees who, with Rolex’s support,

are dedicated to making the world a better place.

For more than four decades, through the Rolex Awards for Enterprise, Rolex has supported exceptional individuals who have the courage and conviction to take on major challenges.

FELIX BROOKS-CHURCH HIS MISSION: SOLVING POOR NUTRITION

One of the saddest statistics of our time is that 15,000 children die each and every day, the result in large part due to poor nutrition.

Enough, thought Felix Brooks-Church. So he came up with a

solution to stop the tragic losses of life. He worked out a way to solve

the nutrition crisis by adding basic nutrients—Vitamin B12, folic acid,

iron, and zinc—to a universal diet staple, flour. He started a program

doing so in Tanzania, providing bags already containing the nutrients

to small, local flour mills, mills often overlooked by any sort of govern-

ment assistance, to fill with flour.

Brooks-Church’s program has taken off and helps nourish two

million people a day, and all for a reasonable cost. Less than $1

dollar will fortify food for one person—a child, mother or baby--for

an entire year. Brooks-Church was struck with the pervasiveness and devastating

result poor nutrition can have on health and life itself when he vol-

unteered to run a program in Cambodia to get children off the streets

and into safe environments. He saw first-hand the toll that poor nu-

trition took on the youngsters. “These children were often sick.

They had weak immune systems, low IQs, learning disabilities and

some died from things that you should

not die from.”

The program is set to expand to other

countries. “What we are doing is not just

adding nutrients to food,” Brooks-

Church said. “What we are going is en-

suring a basic human right, to good

nutrition.”

Felix Brooks-church MIRANDA WANG HER MISSION: SOLVING PLASTIC POLLUTION

In 2010 Miranda Wang’s high school en-

vironmental club took a field trip to a local

landfill in Vancouver. The teenager was

appalled by what she saw: mountains of trash representing only two

or three days of Vancouver’s municipal waste—and mountains con-

tained mostly plastic. She was even more horrified when she learned

that this heap of garbage would soon be carted away to other landfill,

or be incinerated or, more likely, dumped in the ocean and replaced

with a new monumental collection of polluting plastic waste.

Wang and her fellow student Jeanny Yao knew something had to

be done, and decided that they could do it. They came up with a so-

lution: why not utilize a bacteria that would feed on plastic to elimi-

nate the problem. With the help of a professor, they located such a

bacteria in a local river.

Miranda Wang

The solution, while brilliant and effective, could not readily be applied

on the scale Wang and Yao wanted and that the world needed:

globally. So Wang and Yao developed another solution, a chemical

that could be produced and put into action on a grand scale. And it

comes with as bonus: it produces a compound that can be used in

other products, like perfume.

The program is enjoying a pilot run in San Jose, California, before

being rolled out on the wider scale needed to tackle the worldwide

problem: the 340 million metric tons of plastic produced every year.

By 2050, unless something drastic is done, there will be 12 billion

metric tons of plastic in landfills. Wang credits the Rolex Award for

Enterprise with helping take the solution she and Yao have developed

global. “Rolex has helped shine a light on the work we do, boosting

my fundraising to scale-up this new technology invention.”

GINA MOSELEY

HER MISSION: SOLVING GLOBAL WARMING

In the north of Greenland there are caves that are so distant and diffi-

cult to reach that they have only ever been spotted at a distance, but

never entered. Gina Moseley and a team of six explorers are deter-

mined to do so for a very important reason; each cave holds a treas-

ure trove of information that could help prevent our earth from literally

drowning.

That’s the premise and the promise of Artic explorer Mosely. The caves are believed to hold calcite deposits known as

speleothems. “Caves are like time machines,” Mosely

told Rolex. “Calcite forms layers, like tree rings. We can

analyze each layer to get information about the past cli-

mate.” From studying past cooling and warming

periods, scientists can gain insight into the impact the

current melting of the polar caps will have on everything

from rainfall patterns to ocean currents.

And what a past the northern caves will provide. Cur-

rently scientists are studying ice cores that are “only”

128,000 years old. The speleothems Mosely plans to

reach are anticipated to date back half a million years.

The work is vital and can’t come a moment too soon. Polar re-

gions are heating up twice as fast as other areas on the earth. In

2019 so much of the ice in Greenland melted that it added 12 billion

tons of water to the ocean in one day. Said Mosely “The Rolex

Awards are pretty much the only program out there that could or

would support such an expedition.”

Gina Moseley

New art to come