- [Narrator] Our natural world is in trouble.
Habitats and ecosystems are being pushed to the brink,
and for the first time in earth's history,
just one species is to blame, us.
And yet, we are completely dependent on nature.
It gives us the food we eat, the air we breathe,
and the materials to protect us and fuel our economies.
The Earthshot Prize set out a series of urgent challenges
that humankind needs to solve
in the remainder of this decade to repair our planet.
For the natural world to recover
and to give ourselves a chance,
we need solutions now.
From protecting the spaces we have left,
to restoring destroyed habitats
and adapting our own relationships with the land,
these are the finalists for the Earthshot Prize
to protect and restore nature.
In one of the most precious
and biodiverse habitats on earth,
one of humanity's closest relatives
needs all the help it can get.
Orangutans are perhaps the most recognizable inhabitants
of the Bornean rainforest,
but their existence is under threat,
as their home forests are increasingly fragmented.
One group of conservationists is working to stop this
and save one of Earth's most threatened species.
- My name is Isabelle Lackman,
and I'm the co-founder of Hutan,
a wildlife research and conservation program
in the Kinabatangan flood plain in Sabah, Malaysia, Borneo.
Our Earthshot solution to protect and restore nature
is to mediate human wildlife coexistence
in degraded and fragmented habitats.
The Kinabatangan flood plain is an absolutely amazing area.
We have a huge diversity of wildlife.
Past human activities have resulted
in the loss of habitat, and most importantly,
the fragmentation of the remaining patch of forest.
So we have estimated
that the orangutan population in Kinabatangan
have decreased by more than 70% in the past 60 years.
The wildlife that lives
in these small patches of forest at the moment
have no way to move
from one fragment of forest to the other.
A fragment of forest will be the home
of 5, 10, 20, sometimes 50 orangutans.
Males need to disperse and move to another territory
to find unrelated females.
Orangutans trapped in a pocket of forest
eventually will all be related,
so that's a huge threat for the conservation.
We have several pilot projects going on
with communities, with all Borneo plantations.
Through these projects,
we can demonstrate that coexistence is possible.
Well, winning an Earthshot Prize would mean a lot
for Hutan, for all of our team,
and all of our project partners here in Kinabatangan.
It would really mean that the efforts that we're doing
to work together and collaborate
instead of fighting each other
have inspired some people.
- [Narrator] Protecting what natural spaces we have left
is vital,
but what happens when a habitat has already been damaged?
At Chongquing Jiaotong University in China,
Professor Yi Zhijan and a team of students
have created an ingenious way
to bring desertified land back to life.
(Yi speaks in foreign language)
- [Narrator] Restoring desertified land
back to life sustaining soil
is an incredible achievement that has the potential
to help billions of people around the world,
but the problem doesn't end there.
Smallholder farmers are particularly affected
by the world's changing climate.
One company has come up
with a simple and affordable solution
that has already helped hundreds of farmers.
- My name is Kaushik.
I'm from Hyderabad, India.
I'm a social entrepreneur, and the CEO of Kheyti.
The Kheyti Greenhouse in a Box was designed
to solve the challenges of climate risk
and the effects of climate change in Indian agriculture.
Climate change not only affects people in cities,
but more importantly,
wipes out huge swatches of agriculture.
So there are about 100 million small farmers in India,
and they, on average, the Indian government found,
lose money from agriculture.
The climate decides whether they succeed or they fail,
and that risk is getting worse every year
due to climate change.
For the longest time,
agriculture was a little bit in sync in nature,
but over the last 1,500 years,
the overuse of fertilizer, overuse of pesticides,
overuse of other unsustainable farming practices
have depleted soil health
and have also caused pollution in the air,
pollution in the water, and increase in global warming.
So the Kheyti Greenhouse in a Box
is a low cost modular greenhouse
that helps smallholder farmers achieve three things.
First, it increases their incomes
by increasing yield seven times
and helping them grow food throughout the year.
Second, it protects that income from climate change
by having covering materials,
which protect from heat, rain, pests, and hail.
And the third
is that it makes their farming more sustainable
by using 1/50 the water,
when compared to traditional cultivation,
and much lesser pesticides and fertilizers.
So Kheyti today is a 40 member team,
serving around 1,000 farmers across six states of India.
Over the last year,
these farmers have, on average,
increased their incomes by 75%
and saved hundreds of millions of liters of water
by using our greenhouse solution.
Even though there's so many kinds of problems,
I'm mostly optimistic about the future
because I see that together
there is a solution to this problem.
- [Narrator] Nature is under threat right across the planet,
but these three finalists have shown that there is hope.
We can protect what nature we have left.
We can restore nature where it has been damaged.
We can change our practices to work better with nature.
(gentle music)